Earthcheck reaffirms Adelaide Convention Centre's Green Leadership

Submitted by gaccAdmin on Mon, 2011-12-12 08:25
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Date: 
Mon, 2011-12-12 10:25

The Adelaide Convention Centre has achieved EarthCheck Certification for the third year running and reaffirmed its green leadership status.

The Adelaide Convention Centre’s (ACC) is EarthCheck Certified Silver, making it one of the country’s greenest convention and meetings venues under the global environmental program.

In order to receive certification, the Centre has had to report on its environmental footprint to independent auditors and “adheres to the highest science-based standards”, as EarthCheck reported.

During the process, Adelaide Convention Centre was required to submit a year’s worth of operational data which was benchmarked against industry best practice. The data was then measured against a number of key indicators such as energy and water consumption, waste sent to landfill, and community commitment.
The Centre is now firmly on track to be among the first convention centres in Australia to achieve EarthCheck Certified Gold status, partly as the result of $350 million expansion underway, which includes a number of green design initiatives.

To achieve Certified Gold status, the Centre now needs to maintain the EarthCheck Certified status for another two years.

ACC Chief Executive Alec Gilbert said after first EarthCheck accreditation in 2009, the Centre has to undergo a detailed audit each year for five years to finally gain Gold status.

“We have performed at or ‘above best practice’ in eight key areas of natural resource reduction,” Mr Gilbert said.

“We reuse and recycle at least 90 percent of exhibition waste, we are committed to low food mile catering and we operate a world-leading carbon offset program backed by an on-line carbon calculator which allows conference organisers to accurately measure their emissions and offset them through a partnership with Trees for Life.”

“By taking a scientific approach to measuring the effectiveness of their sustainability practices, Adelaide Convention Centre was able to identify where they were out-performing others and where room for improvement remained,” explained EarthCheck CEO Stewart Moore.

“Achieving certification is not an easy task and many organisations do not make it past the benchmarking stage. Securing a highly-ranked benchmarking result requires a strong commitment across all levels of an organisation and the imbedding of sustainability principles into all policies and procedures,” Moore concluded.
EarthCheck is one of the world's largest certifiers of sustainable travel and tourism operators; with more than 1,200 clients in over 65 countries. EarthCheck certification complies with the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) Greenhouse Gas Protocol, and the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) 14064 range of standards for greenhouse gas accounting.

For economies reliant on travel and tourism, EarthCheck’s benchmarking data provides the only historical record of the global environmental impacts of the industry over the past 12 years. More importantly, it rates the effectiveness of industry efforts to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHG) and conserve natural resources at a project-by-project level.

For more information, visit www.earthcheck.org