HeadBox employee named among micebook & ISLA Power 50: Green Champions

Events professional community micebook joined up with sustainability body ISLA to recognise 50 trailblazing individuals in the events industry who have been pushing the green agenda. The awards highlighted the length and breadth of innovation happening at all levels of the sustainable M&E movement. 

We sat down with HeadBox’s own Champion and Senior Product Designer and sustainability lead, Ellen Carpenter Green, for insights on why sustainability needs to be people-powered and feedback-led.

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Tell us a little bit about your role at HeadBox.

I’m a Senior Product Designer for HeadBox Business and at the moment I’m also taking on a broader role around sustainability, helping to define company-wide goals and work out how to reach them.

What does a typical day look like for you?

My Product Design job is really varied so I might be testing a new product that’s about to launch, running a workshop with stakeholders to answer a big question or coming up with new ideas, designing and prototyping new features for our apps or chatting to our customers to make sure we’re building the right things for them.

On the sustainability side, I might be gathering information to measure our own carbon footprint or talking to clients about how we can work together to reduce their emissions.

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How is sustainability relevant to your role, Product Design and the events tech industry in general?

Sustainability is a major priority for our clients - most have really ambitious goals to reach Net Zero in the next few years by reducing their carbon emissions by 80-90%. It’s also a big priority for us as a business - our senior leadership team cares about it, our shareholders care about it and our employees care about it. So it makes sense we’d prioritise it in the product team as well – but it’s not the sort of thing you can limit to a single feature in one of our apps. If we’re going to have a real impact on our clients and our industry, carbon reduction has to be part of everything we do.

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How does a tech company approach the difficulty of addressing external carbon emissions from outsourced tech infrastructure and data centres? Bearing in mind that AWS emitted 44m tonnes of CO₂e in 2020.

As with all our indirect emissions, the first place to start is measuring their contribution to our carbon footprint, so that we can look at ways to reduce it. Our AWS data centre is actually powered entirely by renewable energy so doesn’t contribute to our carbon footprint at all but we are still in the process of measuring the rest of our indirect emissions.

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How is HeadBox working towards sustainability? Could you tell us a bit about the work you’ve been doing recently?

• What sort of timelines has the company set for itself?
• How do these compare to industry-wide targets and goals?
• Where do the biggest difficulties lie?

We’re taking a two-fold approach of making a plan to reduce our own emissions but also working out how to help our clients reduce theirs. We absolutely don’t have all the answers yet but we’re focusing on the areas we think we can have the biggest impact.

From working with our clients, we know that measuring the carbon footprint of an event after it has taken place while being a good starting point, is not enough. If we want to reduce emissions, rather than just offset them, they need information at the point of booking so they can make the most sustainable decision. 

Off the back of these client discussions, we are working on how we can provide more information at the decision stage to help our clients. This will start with the release of our new travel tool – more on this soon. Helping our clients become more sustainable is one of our core strategies for 2023 so expect more from us in this space. 

On the HeadBox side, we are working towards setting a Science Based Target in 2023; this is the gold standard and means committing to deep carbon reductions by 2030. We’re also continuing on our journey to B Corp certification which takes into account our environmental impact, as well as other social and governance measures.

After all the upheaval of the last few years, our biggest difficulties at the moment are in setting a solid benchmark to measure reductions. I think this is something that the industry as a whole is struggling with; it’s still finding its feet again after Covid so it’s taking some time to start tackling the changes we all need to make.

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What demands can we realistically make of our clients when it comes to aiming for sustainability? 

Our clients are leading the way. It is going to mean big shifts in culture and habits but most of the companies we work with are really committed to achieving Net Zero in the next decade. I think the bigger challenge is going to be helping venues make the changes they need to satisfy the demand for sustainable events.

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What can venues and people in the events industry do to be more sustainable?

Like other businesses, the best place for venues to start is by measuring their carbon footprint so that they can identify areas for reduction. That’s sometimes easier said than done but they can start small, with Scope 1 and 2 emissions (essentially their gas and electricity supplier and usage) and then move on to looking at their Scope 3 or indirect emissions (eg. suppliers, employees). 

Having said that, the biggest source of emissions for an event is usually travel, so the best way for the event industry to reduce its carbon footprint is to focus on holding events locally or promoting public transport for reaching venues.

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Generally speaking, what changes can we make to live more sustainable lives?

It’s really easy to get overwhelmed trying to be more sustainable. You can start with one thing - only buying secondhand clothes, or cutting out red meat for example - and when that’s become a habit, pick something else to add on.