VisitDenmark received the EIBTM Sustainability Award 2014 for its brand new stand design based on the principles of the Danish Meetovation concept and launched at this week’s EIBTM expo in Barcelona.
The EIBTM Sustainability Award 2014 recognizes and highlights industry suppliers’ commitments and achievements within sustainability and targets exhibitors, agencies and suppliers who can showcase good examples of sustainability in their activities.
The sustainable Danish stand is based on a foldable furniture system designed and built by young Danish artist / designer Thomas Dambo who specializes in building from trash / recyclable materials. The box system created for VisitDenmark is based on a brief to create a sustainable, highly flexible and creative stand based on the principles of the Danish meeting design concept Meetovation and to stress sustainable living in Denmark. The system’s 45 boxes can be stacked to make seating and tables in different sizes and all boxes as well as two magazine stands are foldable to fit inside the stand’s mobile bar. In addition, the environmentally friendly box system takes up 40 per cent less space when transported to expos and business events worldwide.
Steen Møller, Head of Business Events for VisitDenmark explains:
– The EIBTM Sustainability Award 2014 is a great acknowledgement of our destination’s tireless efforts to get sustainable meetings management higher on the agenda worldwide. The Danish stand symbolises everything that our Danish Meetings Industry believes in and builds on; creating MINDblowing Meetings via responsible thinking, flexibility, creativity, involvement and innovativeness in order to achieve the highest Return of Meeting Investment on any type of business event.
– In recent years, Denmark has shown great results within sustainable meetings management; We developed the CSMP – Copenhagen Sustainable Meetings Protocol methodology and used it for two pioneering sustainable events in Denmark, the COP15 Climate Conference and the ISO-20121 certified Danish EU Presidency. We also developed event sustainability strategies in Copenhagen, Aarhus and Aalborg, and have been part of creating the first ever ‘ICCA Scandinavian Sustainability Index‘. In fact, there are few countries in the world with such a high percentage of certified hotels and venues, catering companies and restaurants that serve organic food at parity prices, and agencies with such an indepth knowledge of sustainability, as there is in Denmark nowadays. We’ve also created tangible tools for Responsible Thinking in meetings, Meetovation style, and most recently the #Beesustain campaign was created by Copenhagen CVB and nominated for the ICCA Best Marketing Award 2014, and hopefully this helps to inspire others within the industry to follow suit too, Steen Møller adds.
Watch the ‘All in a Box’ video by Thomas Dambo on YouTube to see how responsible thinking and the creative use of physical set ups go hand in hand in Denmark.
It is the second time in just five years that VisitDenmark recieves an accolade for the destination’s sustainable efforts; In 2009 the official national tourism organisation received a ‘Sustainable Activites Initiative’ Award at EIBTM.
