Environmental Sustainability at ISC

The promise to reduce carbon emission has recently caught up with the event industry. Many convention centers in Germany are committed to various initiatives – from reducing food wastage and non-recyclables to raising energy conservation.

Even before the emergence of climate-change nomenclature like carbon-neutral or carbon zero, ISC has been quite aware of minimizing waste. Some of us in the ISC Team still remember the instances where attendees referred to us as the “posh HPC event,” because we serve meals and refreshments using chinaware and silverware. One can imagine the environmental burden if we hadn’t stuck to this practice since 1986.

Another important goal of ours is to reduce overall paper waste. We used to take pride in our conference guide – some of you might remember the compact ring booklet that contained the week’s program and other pertinent information – hundreds of pages printed in somewhere between 3500 to 5000 copies. Four years ago, we got rid of that by providing all this information in digital form. If COVID-19 hadn’t interrupted our in-person events, we would have implemented a sustainability initiative to address different aspects of the conference that impact the environment.

Here we would also like to commend our booth building partner, cubicworx for constructing the majority of booths at ISC with reusable modules, which is more friendly to the environment.

Although we cannot influence the mode of travel, we’ve nevertheless partnered with Deutsche Bahn for many years now, to encourage our local and regional attendees to use the ISC Event Ticket to get to and from ISC.

Moving to Hamburg is very exciting for us for different reasons. Not only is it a great city that is easily accessible, but the Hamburg Messe und Congress GmbH, the owner and operator of the Congress Center Hamburg, has joined the Net Zero Carbon Events initiative as a signatory. As an event, we look forward to carrying our sustainable efforts over to Hamburg, while also learning from their experience.

A final request to our exhibitors: please consider the environmental impact of conference swags/giveaways by handing out items that offer value beyond the event. Thank you!

We look forward to seeing everyone on May 29.

Best regards,
The ISC Team