A pledge has been made to end world poverty, inequality and reverse climate change by 2030. We’ve started making our own pledges, each falling within the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, in a recognition of the work that is still needed to be done. COP26 made progress, but the real challenge will be implementing actionable change.

IMPLEMENTING THE UN SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

Percol Coffee's first sustainable coffee shop by Marble LDN

We recognise how hard it is to cut through the voices in our industry who talk about sustainability, but here at Marble LDN it’s at the centre of everything we do, and we strive to have a more positive impact on communities and on the planet. 

Leading our sustainability initiative is Head of Production and Technical, Becky Bunting. Here, she takes a look at the different areas of Sustainable Development we’ll be tapping into over the coming year.

1) Get accredited 

Striving to be sustainable is nothing without clear goal-setting and KPIs, so we’ve been working towards our ISO 20121:2012 & ISO 14001:2015 accreditations. As part of this, we are setting individual targets for every project and holding ourselves accountable with a percentage score based on our performance. 

We’re also vetting all of our suppliers, venues and partners to ensure that we’re creating a circular economy within our projects, helping them with their accreditations and measuring their impact on the planet.

This is achieved through a questionnaire and review of their policies, following this suppliers are given a traffic light rating. If suppliers are not performing as well as we’d like, we will work with them to help them improve and become more sustainable. 

2) Reducing carbon emissions

We began by collecting historic data to undertake carbon footprint analysis and clarify the scope for improvement in accordance with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. From there we set SMART targets for the future, calculated using the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and developed plans on how to meet them.

Moving forward we will be monitoring and measuring carbon associated with our transport to track annual business travel performance. We’ll harness this data to establish a realistic timeline to achieve net zero. 

Noisily Festival by Marble LDN

3) Inspire the next generation of sustainable leaders

Sustainability is weaved through everything we do, from forming part of the new starter induction process to every staff member being trained on sustainability as part of the company matrix and even forming part of all employees appraisals.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is important to us and an area that we intend to create targeted programmes to support underrepresented groups within our industry. It’s also an overlooked area of the UN Sustainable Goals.

We offer hybrid working and training opportunities for all our employees to help their personal and professional development, as well as providing a voice for all those in our agency no matter what their background or beliefs.

4) Lead initiatives that drive action

Moving forward we will be producing reports for all clients, specific to their project, with tangible results that can be benchmarked against other clients and used for tracking improvements in future work together. 

Project objectives and achievements will feed directly into our client’s sustainability goals to create a legacy and return on investment. This will be the case for all projects, whether virtual, hybrid or physical.

In the words of Greta Thunberg: “The main solution is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop the emission of greenhouse gases.” We want to help pave the way for our event industry peers to make better choices for the planet; you can chat with us today about your upcoming event or collaborate with us by contacting info@marbleldn.com