Green Meetings and Events

By their nature, parades involve vehicles; pulling floats, or as centerpieces to the event (everyone loves a firetruck!) However, parade vehicles drive slowly, and spend a great deal of time idling along the parade route, resulting in high vehicle emissions. Here are some ideas to reduce vehicle emissions from your parade and make it a more environmentally-friendly event:

• Make the event a zero-emission event; no gas or diesel vehicles may be driven. Instead, challenge participants to pull or push their vehicle!
• Use low-emission or zero-emission vehicles to pull the floats
• Hold a contest for the most creative zero-emission float
• Showcase zero-emission sustainable transportation options (bicycles, walking, in-line skates)
• Showcase a transit hybrid bus
• Place recycling bins along the parade route, or have recycling bins on wheels pushed/pulled along as part of the parade by characters in costumes representing recycling (e.g. pop cans, bottles, blue box) or people on bicycles
• If you do choose to use fossil-fuel vehicles, consider purchasing an offset for the parade's total emissions, and make the event emission neutral (see the section on Carbon Neutral Conferencing).

Internal Policies
To ensure that all meetings, events and conferences being planned by your municipality are consistently as environmentally sensitive as possible, consider the adoption of existing check-lists or sample policies to apply throughout your organization. Not every event will be able to meet all the standards, but using the same check-list on an on-going basis will ensure that all options are being considered. See the Resources Section for more information and sources of existing comprehensive check-lists, and examples of other agencies applying these standards to their event planning.