Trendsetter Tuesday: The Journey to Hosting Sustainable Events With Eric Zimmerman

To celebrate our 2024 Meetings Trendsetters, Meetings Today launched "Trendsetter Tuesday," a podcast series of interviews with the 20 Trendsetters recognized in our July/August issue.

In this latest episode, Senior Content Director Danielle LeBreck sits down with Eric Zimmerman, CEO of TripZero, where he details his innovative work to help meeting planners organize more sustainable events at no additional cost and offers practical tips for how to green your meeting for the first time. Plus, he tells the story of his own personal sustainability journey and how the idea for TripZero was found.

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Transcript

Editors note: The following transcription was facilitated by an AI program and proofed by our editors. Although it is very accurate, there inevitably will be some mistakes, so please consider that when reading. Thank you.

Danielle LeBreck
Hello, and welcome to this Meetings Today podcast. I’m Danielle LeBreck, senior content director for Meetings Today. To celebrate our 2024 Meetings Trendsetters, we at Meetings Today launched "Trendsetter Tuesday," a podcast series of interviews with the Trendsetters recognized in our July/August issue.

In this latest installment of the series, I’m excited to welcome Eric Zimmerman as our guest today. Eric is the CEO of TripZero, and was named a trendsetter this year because of his work at TripZero, which helps organizers run net-zero carbon events without added cost to clients or attendees. TripZero acts as a third-party planner and housing agency, sourcing and managing hotel room blocks for everything from reggae festivals to insurance conferences, then redeploys the commissions it earns from hotels to purchase high-quality carbon offsets that balance the huge impact of attendee air travel to an event. 

Along the way, Eric and his team also collaborate with meeting planners to maximize onsite sustainability in everything from F&B to event signage. They also help planners create and share sustainability stories with attendees.

We are going to dig into more of this work today with Eric, and learn more about his story in the events industry and his passion for sustainability. With that, welcome to podcast, Eric!

[Related: The 2024 Meetings Trendsetters Paving New Paths in the Events Industry]

Eric Zimmerman
Danielle, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Danielle LeBreck
I know I gave a brief introduction, but let's just kick things off by you introducing yourself to our listeners and telling us a little bit about your history in the meetings industry and ultimately your journey to starting TripZero.

Eric Zimmerman
Sure, happy to do it.

I'm Eric Zimmerman, the CEO of TripZero. You've aptly introduced what our company does, so I'm going to actually just start, I think with a bit of a confession, which is that I haven't always been a sustainability guy.

In fact, from a carbon footprint perspective, I used to be Public Enemy No. 1. I became a sustainability guy after attending a conference, which ironically, I flew to. So here's the story.

Was about 15 years ago and I was attending a Green Building Conference where I listened to a keynote address that was given by this brilliant architect by the name of Eric Corey Freed, and he gave this impassioned talk about climate change and how it was going to impact pretty much every living thing on the planet. And at the end of Mr. Freed's talk, he sort of paused, and he said, ‘Look, my biggest fear is that my daughter's generation is going to grow up on a destroyed planet. And they're going to look back on my generation, not my parents’ generation, not my grandparents, but my generation, and they're going to say you knew and you didn't do anything about it. What the hell was wrong with you?’

And I don't know if you've ever sat in a room with five or 600 people, and you’re certain that the speaker was speaking just to you, but that was my moment. He really got to me, and that conference turned out to be an inflection point for me.

It triggered a long sustainability journey that started with the book publishing company that I was running at the time.

I went back and pulled the team together and over the next couple of years we cleaned up the supply chain for our book publishing business and we drove the creation of a new kind of book paper that's made from post-consumer waste recycled fiber. It works really, really well and we save thousands of trees, millions of gallons of water and we significantly reduced the overall carbon footprint of our business and at the same time, our employees and our customers loved it. And that feedback loop was incredible for me. I have to say I sort of got hooked and I wanted more.

So, I decided to take a look at my personal footprint and my wife Abby and I decided to start with our house. So, way back in 2011, when this was sort of bleeding edge activity, we hired this amazing builder and an architect and we did what's called a deep energy retrofit to our house. So, the roof came off. All the windows came out. I nearly got divorced and then the house was super insulated and air sealed. And as a result—kidding about the divorce part, obviously—we reduced the energy consumption on the house by almost 70% and then we put enough solar panels on the roof to run the entire house and to electric vehicles.

So technically, our house and our life is now carbon positive and we thought ‘Hooray, we're done!’

Then I made the mistake of picking up The New York Times and reading an article, and I made this accidental discovery about air travel. It turns out that my biggest carbon footprint wasn't my house at all, but it was all the flying that I did for business. So, I did a retroactive calculation of a typical year's worth of business flights and I was producing over 50 tons of CO2 a year. To put that in perspective, the average U.S. citizen creates about 16 tons a year. The average citizen of Europe, about eight tons a year and the average citizen of India about one ton a year.

Me, just for my business travel, not the rest of my life, creating 50 tons a year.

Hence, me being Public Enemy No. 1.

The second thing I learned about almost proximate to that was this wonderful world of carbon offset projects. All around the globe there are these amazing projects that are either designed to prevent CO2 from entering the atmosphere or to cause it to be reabsorbed from the atmosphere once it's been emitted. So we might be talking about like a solar energy project in India that displaces a coal-fired power plant. Or we might be talking about a reforestation project in Southern Chile that's regrowing a native species rainforest on land that had been denuded for raising cattle.

And it was the combination of these two things that inspired me to launch TripZero.

When the business actually launched, we were actually an OTA; we were an online travel agency serving consumers and you could book a hotel anywhere in the world and then we would measure and offset the carbon footprint created by your travel for free. And within about two months of launching, we started to get calls from conference organizers and the call sort of went like this:

‘Hey, Eric. We're bringing about 1,500 people to a new city every year. I'm pretty sure we've got a big carbon footprint if we do. It's not consistent with the organizational values, our attendees values. Can you help?’

And if you know like any good startup, we said absolutely yes. And fell sideways into the conference and events business and it's now 100% of what we do.

Danielle LeBreck 
What an incredible journey to where you are today. I think a lot of us with our passion projects have that one moment that really speaks to you and is the catalyst for changing your life. And so it's really interesting to hear your journey and I think a lot of people feel how you do that they have this large impact. I think for meeting organizers, one of the biggest hurdles for them is cost. When it comes to prioritizing sustainability. It's something our industry talks a lot about, but the execution at events I think is still wanting for a lot of event professionals.

So do you think this is because of cost or are there other reasons? What barriers are event professionals and your experience facing when they're trying to create a more sustainable event and how can TripZero really help them effectively green meetings while managing costs?

Eric Zimmerman
I get it. And you know, we've been doing this for about 12 years. And I would say there are three barriers that come to mind and they are simply knowledge, time and cost as you mentioned. And we can help across all three fronts.

So if we start with knowledge, you know there's a plethora of information out there on the web about how one might make an event more sustainable. And you could spend your entire day reading articles and your entire event planning budget trying to implement some of that stuff and not be really clear that what you're doing is the right thing. Are you following the science? Are you having the impact that you want to have?

So because we've been doing this for a while, we can help our clients eliminate 90% of the environmental impact of their events by simply doing three things. By addressing plastics, food choices and food waste, and of course, the carbon footprint created by travel.

So if you'll allow me, let me start with plastic.

So unless you've been living under a rock, you've seen their impact on the environment and you know that only about 5% of plastics actually get recycled.

Everything else either ends up in a landfill and incinerator, or in the ocean, where she at and in the U.S. manufacturing plastic is responsible for about 4% of our total greenhouse gas emissions. So the answer here is let's just completely eliminate single-use plastics from our events. There's a reusable or compostable subject substitute for every product we buy and our attendees will love us for it.

I mean, nobody wants to walk into a plenary room that's set for 500 people and see 500 plastic bottles of water there anymore. If you do that and you got attendees that are under the age of 30, they look around and think you didn’t get the memo?

Then we move on to food choices and food waste.

So everywhere we turn, you know you're reading about the environmental and health benefits of consuming less meat and more plants. So I'm not going to recover that ground here, but what you may not know is that 25% of the stuff that gets tossed into landfills is actually food. And when that food goes into a landfill, it breaks down and creates a greenhouse gas called methane, which is 80 times more potent than CO2, from a global warming perspective.

In the U.S., those landfills produce 14% of our total greenhouse gas emissions.

So it's a really big deal and the answer here is easy. Instead of throwing it away, we either rescue it or we make sure that it's getting composted. It doesn't cost a thing and it creates this beautiful soil additive that makes for healthy soil and really happy farmers too.

And the third piece to this and it's you know, it's the elephant in the room and that's the huge carbon footprint created by travel. Just a couple of weeks ago.

I attended and spoke an event that we'd helped to plan, and it was a 600-person event that created about 750 tons of travel CO2. That's the equivalent of pulling 9 tanker trucks full of gasoline up to the registration desk and lighting them on fire day one.

[Related: How to Host a Sustainable Event in Boston]

Danielle LeBreck
Wow.

Eric Zimmerman
Yeah, it's a scary thought.

Danielle LeBreck   
Yeah.

Eric Zimmerman
And this was on a beautiful college campus, so we definitely want don't want to do that. Fortunately we can fix this too and by purchasing certified carbon offsets.

We can finance projects that will recapture that CO2 and we can fix the problem and we wind up powering some really cool renewable energy and reforestation projects in the process.

So the answer of knowledge is, there are a million things you can do, but if you do those three, if you address those three, you'll be dealing with 90% of the environmental impact of your event.

So then we move to time, which for most of our conference organizers is the biggest impediment to this. If you've never done it before, it can feel daunting.

This is where clients who work with TripZero. It's sort of a three-part win and you know the first is very pedestrian and it just relates to event sourcing and housing management.

So, you know anyone who's planned a large event knows that the process can take weeks or even months to put together. You know, in the lead up to opening registration, you're researching potential sites and venues. You're issuing RFPs.

You're managing responses. You're negotiating contracts. Creating websites. The list goes on.

And then once the event is live, you're managing attendee housing, you're monitoring hotel blocks, and you're creating all those post-event reports that your accounting team insists on.

So we take all of that work off of our clients’ plates, which frees them up to focus on programming and sponsors and speakers and the attendee experience that's going to make their event memorable and also financially successful.

It also frees up some bandwidth to integrate sustainability into their planning process. So that's part one.

The second piece relates to onsite sustainability.

We know from experience here at TripZero that the first time you do this, it's a lot more time consuming than the 10th time you do it. And since we know what to do and how to have the conversations with suppliers and venues we can get our clients up that curve really, really quickly and I would dare say painlessly. So what might otherwise be a really time consuming additional process for them is now just baked into their everyday conversations with venues and with suppliers.

And then, of course, the third win relates to that elephant in the room, which is the huge carbon footprint created by attendee travel. And this doesn't take our clients any time at all. So they simply share with us a list of attendees. Our system does a calculation of the carbon footprint created by everyone's travel to the event.

And then we purchased certified carbon offsets that mitigate the impact of that travel. And those are offsets that we've already spent a lot of time researching and understanding. So everyone can be certain that they're having the impact that we want them to have.

Danielle LeBreck
I was just gonna follow up with a question about that, just to clarify. So for the planner that's working with you on purchasing those carbon offsets, does that come at additional cost to that client or is that TripZero covering that cost?

Eric Zimmerman
TripZero covers that cost 100%.

Danielle LeBreck 
Yeah, that's amazing.

Eric Zimmerman
Thank you. Our business model is that we take a big piece of the commission that we earn from hotels and we repurpose that to buy certified carbon offsets.

It was our attempt to sort of take the friction and resistance out of this process, so make it easy for people to say yes to work with us, and I should also mention that it's one of the primary criteria that allows us to become a certified B. Corp which is a community that we're quite proud to be a part of.

Danielle LeBreck 
Great.

Eric Zimmerman
To the cost question, sort of more generally, a lot of our clients sort of have entered the process thinking that it's going to cost more to run a sustainable event. But as you work through these three big levers, you learned that that's actually not really
the case so if you start with plastic. So there's a non-plastic alternative for every piece of single-use plastic that might show up at our events, and some of them might be a little more expensive, but most are cost equivalent. A soda that served in an aluminum can doesn't cost any more than one that comes in a plastic bottle. And there are a lot of events where eliminating plastic actually becomes a cost savings.

For instance, it's a lot cheaper to set up effective water stations where we can all come and refill those water bottles, you know, those aluminum water bottles that we're all carrying to events anyway, than it is to serve hundreds or thousands of plastic bottles of water to attendees.

Food then becomes the next opportunity.

If you've been at this for a while as an event planner, you've probably seen fairly significant inflation in your food costs over the last four or five years. Especially in meat-based food choices. So planning a plant-forward menu, which is what we advise, almost always represents a cost savings in the overall food and beverage budget, not to mention leaves a lot of attendees feeling better after lunch and more alert for the afternoon sessions.

And then the next step in that process for us is rescuing food that that's still consumable and that costs nothing or next to nothing. Very often it makes its way into employee break rooms as long as we're organized and can coordinate that.

Or if it's picked up by a nonprofit, that's repurposing that maybe delivering it to local shelters, that's typically free too. Although I should say that many of our clients will make a donation to those nonprofits, in support of their mission and in support of their work.

And then lastly there's the composting piece, which if it's in place doesn't cost the venue that's doing it. Any more money than having trash hauled away? And if you need to bring in an outside service to help your venue because they don't have a system in place, that cost is typically a rounding error when compared to your overall F&B budget, so it really doesn't drive a lot of cost to have a sustainable F&B program.

And then of course, as you mentioned, carbon offsets, right. When you're working with TripZero, that cost comes out of the commission that we earn from hotels and it's free to our meeting planners. Period.

[Related: 5 Sustainability Trends in the Conventions Industry]

Danielle LeBreck  
Yeah, I love how you provided kind of a practical breakdown of how hosting a sustainable event doesn't need to be a super expensive endeavor, which I think is kind of the perception currently. So thanks for breaking all that down for us.

Eric Zimmerman
Yeah.

Danielle LeBreck
I also think it might be helpful to hear about some recent examples of how you've helped clients with their sustainability goals, how you've taken some of these core principles of your business and put them into practice recently, maybe one or two events you could share.

Eric Zimmerman
Happy to. I'll share two with you on two different coasts and two different ends of the spectrum.

The first is an event that's called Building Energy Boston. It takes place in Boston every year, and it's a green building event that brings over 1,000 attendees to the Seaport District of Boston. They're there to learn from architects and builders about how to do more sustainable single-family houses and multifamily units. And for almost 10 years. we've provided them with venues and their hotels and of course offset the carbon footprint create by everyone's travel.

More recently, we've collaborated with them on their onsite sustainability and I'm happy to report that they are now doing everything right and it is completely internally driven by their team. Their events are 100% plastic-free. All of their uneaten food was either rescued and used internally at the venue or delivered to local shelters to feed folks who might not otherwise have that opportunity and 100% of their food waste is now composted as well. So they're walking the talk as it relates to their event for sure.

Danielle LeBreck 
Yeah, that's amazing. And I love how because you've worked with them for so long now, their team really feels confident in putting these practices into their event every year. So that's amazing.

Eric Zimmerman
Yeah, it it's fun to see it. It's fun to work on people with people during the start-up year, so to speak, and then it's even more fun to see them just pick it up and run with it, you know, thereafter.

Danielle LeBreck
Exactly, yeah.

Eric Zimmerman
So then the other event, other coast, other end of the spectrum, is the one that you mentioned up front, which is a reggae festival.
So we work with this amazing organization called California Roots and they run a large reggae festival in Monterey, California. Every year it brings about 20,000 people to the Monterey Peninsula. By the way, if you're into that style of music, absolutely go check out the bands that they host. It's incredible and I have to say that this team, they've been on the leading edge of onsite sustainability ever since we've known them. In fact, we've learned a lot from them, which is one of the joys in our business is that we've got clients that teach us everyday so they don't only do onsite composting, but they have a this cohort of shiny young volunteers onsite who teach everyone as they are as they are approaching the composting and recycling bins, what's important about composting and how to do it properly. They went plastic free way before plastic free was cool. And by introducing stainless steel cups at their events, they eliminate over 30,000 plastic cups every year.

Danielle LeBreck
Wow.

Eric Zimmerman
Yeah. And when you think about that over, you know, 10-15 year period, it really adds up. So we provide the hotels for, for fans and artists, and in a typical year we'll offset over 2,000 tons of CO2 for that event, which is the equivalent of taking 450 cars off the road for an entire year. It's really important to their team and as you can tell, we're super proud of that of that partnership.

Danielle LeBreck
It's amazing. So how do you hope to continue motivating and inspiring the industry through your work? You've done some really amazing things already. How do you hope to just take that momentum and keep spreading the knowledge about sustainability and inspiring other event organizers to get on board?

Eric Zimmerman
Your thinking evolves the more you do this. And I've recently sort of come to the belief that, for your listeners, for those of us in this industry, there's kind of a superpower that's hiding among our conferences and events. If you think about it for a moment, our events, they attract global leaders in industry, government, the arts, academe, and these folks look forward to meeting in person and yet they're increasingly concerned about the impact that their travel is going to have on the environment and the local community. If we address these concerns head on, as we've talked about here, and then all importantly, we share what we're doing through our event website and through signage at the event and post-event reporting, these leaders are going to take these ideas back to their own organizations and they're going to share them and they're going to ask why their own organizations aren't doing them, whether that organization is a company or a community or a town board or what have you.

And as they do, these practices will spread and our impact will spread.

We in the event industry are in a position to influence influencers who can drive a global sustainability movement. So that's what I'm hoping will help to inspire the folks that are just entering this process. It's not just about your event, but it's the ability to drive a global movement and drive systemic change.

Danielle LeBreck
Yeah, we have the power to influence influencers. I love that.

Eric Zimmerman
Yeah.

Danielle LeBreck 
On the flip side of that, what keeps you going? How do you stay motivated to do this work? Because it's really hard work and I'm sure there are days where things are really difficult and you can get a little down about the state of our world and the carbon footprint that we're all leaving. What keeps you going?

Eric Zimmerman
You know, I think about three things.

The first are the carbon offset projects themselves. So you know whether it's a renewable energy project in India or one of those reforestation projects that I described to you or regenerative agricultural project happening out in Montana, I'm always amazed by the creativity that project developers have and the impact that their projects have. And every time I see one, I look at them and say, well, I want more of that, right? And everyone I know says yeah, I want more of that too.

And that's a big driver. It's a it's great to see the work you do causing that impact.

The other two things, I can't say this enough, is our clients. So as it turns out when you run a business like TripZero, you tend to attract really cool clients and they come from all walks of life. I mean, we're serving on one hand, a reggae festival and on the other end of the spectrum, an insurance conference and everything in between.

But there's a commonality between these folks. And that they really care about the future of our planet. It's climate change's impact on humanity, and they want to have an impact. They want to make change, and these are just joyful people to work with no matter what industry they're in.

So we're very, very fortunate in that respect. And I would just say lastly, the team of people that work at TripZero here, we only hire smart what we call happy fun people.

That live and breathe our mission and just at a personal level, I'm really grateful to work with a team like this. It makes coming to the office or hopping on yet another Zoom call all that more fun.

Danielle LeBreck
Right. Yeah, that's amazing. How can meeting organizers get in touch with you if they wanna start working with TripZero, or if they're inspired by this conversation to start their sustainability journey with their convention or conference or festival?

Eric Zimmerman
Two quick, easy ways they can drop an e-mail off to hi@tripzero.com and it'll reach my desk and we'll be happy to start a conversation. Or they can visit tripzero.events and click the contact us button and schedule a meeting right there, and we'll be on the phone a couple days later.

Danielle LeBreck 
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Eric. I know I'm really excited to continue to follow your work in sustainability. I think this is only going to grow in importance from here on out in the events industry. There's a lot of buzz about it, so I'm excited to see more people take some action and see the great work that you and your team are doing.

So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and share more about your journey in the industry today.

Eric Zimmerman
You're welcome, Danielle, and thank you so much for, you know, shining a bit of a bright light on the work that we're doing here and being so supportive of it. I'm very grateful.

Danielle LeBreck
All for listening to the Meetings Today podcast. If you'd like to learn more about our trendsetters, check out more Trendsetter Tuesday podcast at meetingstoday.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks.

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