UXcampAMS is the fruition of a small team of volunteers who give up their free time to put on an awesome events for you guys. This involves all manner of “obvious” tasks (finding a venue, negotiating with sponsors, “selling” tickets, arranging catering) and all manner of less obvious ones (venue walk throughs and staging, ordering lanyards, printing badges and signs, working on ways to constantly evolve UXcamp). One of the topics that we always try and consider (and indeed, one that we get asked a lot of questions on) is sustainability.
Our Goal
The UXcamp Amsterdam organizing team have an explicit goal to run our events with sustainability at the top of our minds. We aim to leave as low of an environmental footprint as possible. UXcampAMS19 has seen a greater focus on this with the advice and guidance of our Sustainability Consultant, Giulia Benucci.
Giulia is helping to educate us to understand the ecological footprint of UXcamp AMS and where we can make better and different choices to improve it. She has developed a checklist which we use to review all aspects of our event such as Venue assessment, Catering selection, Swag and giveaways and options for Printed materials. It contains trigger questions, metrics and recommendations that we can use when assessing potential suppliers and will help us build a foundation to ensure that we continue to develop in this area and embed sustainability into everything that we do and each decision that we make.
What we need from you
We won’t pretend that we have 100% influence on all sustainability aspects of UXcamp Amsterdam. We’re at the mercy of (very tight) budgets, suppliers and indeed you, our amazing community. With that in mind, here are some things we need from you to ensure to help us with our goal:
If you can no longer attend the event PLEASE cancel your ticket.
If you have a ticket for UXcamp Amsterdam, we assume that you will turn up. That means that we will order food for you, print a name badge for you, purchase a lanyard for you etc. If you don’t show up, then this creates enormous unnecessary waste. Our event is free, and as such, we understand that the decision to skip the event comes with little personal cost to you, but please, do the decent thing. If you know in advance that you can’t make the event, let us know. Preferably in time for us to adjust catering and print runs accordingly and thus minimise unnecessary waste.
Arrive by Public Transport or Bike
The venue is easily accessible by Tram, Metro and Bike. It’s one of our key criteria when selecting a venue. So while the temptation to take an Uber or come by car is there, do us a favour and resist that urge!
Bring your own Water Bottles
An obvious one, but last year, we supplied 100’s of bottles of water, all in single-use plastic bottles. It broke our hearts a little seeing all the waste that we’d facilitated unnecessarily. We won’t be doing that again! This year, our venue has plentiful drinking water supplied by Join the Pipe fountains located in the venue (one of the items we look for when using our Sustainability Checklist as mentioned above!) So please, bring your own water bottle. And if you don’t have one yet, head to Join the Pipe and grab one from there. They do brilliant work setting up drinking water projects in the developing world.
Keep waste to a minimum & Dispose in the right way
If you are bringing any printed material, please consider how much is needed and what can be distributed after the event / digitally in your session.
Throughout the venue there are separate bins for different types of waste. Take a second to use the right one and ignore the temptation to hust through rubbish in the “General” bin if there are alternatives
Speak to us!
If you have ideas on how to minimise the environmental impact of our event, please let us know! We’re always open to suggestions, and have reviewed a number of ideas that have come from our community. Some are not feasible or viable, some we will include in this years event, but we are ALWAYS open to feedback on what we all consider to be a crucial area of UXcamp Amsterdam
Finally, if you are running an event and would like to see that Sustainability Framework that we are working with, we are more than happy to share this with you. Please Contact Us!
