Trent Wolbe: Sustainability Lead for Global Events and Experiences at Google
Trent Wolbe is the Sustainability Lead for Global Events and Experiences at Google. Trent dives into what to communicate with partners, why it’s important to start early, and how to message your sustainability achievements.
Hi Trent! What was the catalyst for your interest in events and sustainability?
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a personal interest in sustainability. When my daughter was born eight years ago, I wanted to discover and implement sustainability initiatives, beyond my personal scope, in terms of carbon, waste, and the health of our planet. I started to look at ways in my professional life that I could begin to expand outside my personal footprint.
At Google, we have a long history of sustainability woven into the core of what we do. We were among the first large companies to invest at scale in wind and solar. Google went carbon neutral in 2007, and we have a plan to operate on carbon-free energy 24/7 by 2030. Besides the fact that Google is one of my favorite websites, I was excited to join Google’s events and experiences team because of our larger sustainability initiatives.
In the beginning, we began to talk about ways to start to normalize the conversation around sustainability, and identify the low hanging fruit. I think a lot of people have sustainability on their minds, but they don't know where to start. I often hear, “I do sustainability at home, but I don't do it at my job.” But right now, “every job is a climate job” as said by Jamie Alexander of Project Drawdown. Everyone needs to start thinking about their impacts further down the line. So as an event professional, I started to reach out to others in the field, and to try to understand what the impacts are, and to understand what we can to make things better.
Many people think they need to get a PhD in climate science, and then do the work. But that's not efficient, and we don't have that luxury of time and money before we begin to make an impact. For me, it’s been a journey of trying to understand where I can take that personal passion, and try to do what I can to talk to my community, and normalize the conversation. And to understand where our points of leverage are as events people and as marketers.
I agree 100% that you don’t need a degree in science to incorporate sustainability into your life and work. Can you offer advice on how to start? And what are examples of low hanging fruit?
The first thing we can do is normalize the conversation. Start talking about it with your friends, your family, your peers at work. Not being afraid to bring it up is a really empowering thing. As soon as you bring it up, people will start coming out of the woodwork, and you’ll be surprised how much support is out there. That’s the first low hanging fruit.
Other low hanging fruits are discovering where your professional community is on climate, and understanding the business case for sustainability. Determine where your company is in its sustainability journey. Next, start to understand where your buckets of impact are. For smaller businesses, it can be challenging, but I think brands of all sizes are starting to incorporate authentic sustainability measures, carbon targets, and waste targets into their messaging and actions.
At Google, we have the benefit of great leadership, and the history of having our sustainability journey be at the core of what we do. Event marketers at larger companies can send out these sort of beacons, you can call them market signals, indicating that we are interested in knowing the carbon and waste footprint of our events. This is something that I have been working on, to get more accurate measurements of the carbon footprint of our events.
What about having a sustainability policy in place?
One really good part about having a sustainability plan is that it forces you to think about it. Even if the sustainability plan is: hey, we're just figuring this out. We're not gonna do this perfectly the first time or probably ever, but we're always learning. Showing that you have a sustainability goal, mindset, or specific set of actions (or reduction targets) is an important signal to everyone involved in the ecosystem you're working in.
At Google, we have our carbon free commitment right at the bottom of Google.com. That just happened at the end of 2020. That's one signal that shows our commitment to everybody who goes to Google.com. Aside from the search bar, and two buttons, our sustainability commitment is one of the only things that's always on our homepage. We’re showing people that having a livable planet sits high on the scale of what’s important to our organization.
But to get more tactical, it’s important for the people you're working with to understand what you mean when you say, “I want this to be sustainable.” You need to have a clear goal and plan for people to get from zero to one. You need to be able to answer the questions, and allow time for partners to understand what you're talking about. Like, how are we going to measure this? Are we going to get paid for our time and accounting for all of this stuff? You have to be able to answer all those questions, because in some cases it's more work. And the earlier you start to do those things, you get your “dumb questions” out of the way, and then you start to do the actual work. And over time your questions become less and less “dumb” and turn into answers. That's a great thing.
You bring up a good point about sustainability costing more money. Is that always the case?
I think a big misconception is that this always costs more. I think there is a potential sticker shock: “Oh my gosh, these compostable plates cost three times what I’ve previously used.” And that may be true, but that's really not where the emphasis should be. Everyone talks about reduce, reuse, recycle. But in our industry, and in many industries, we tend to flip that. We tend to recycle first, reuse second, and reduce third. But really, the bulk of our work should be about reducing. The less that we ask of our finite natural resources, the better. And that's often completely glossed over. We can do more with less. And that's where reduce comes in. I try to impress upon people to start early. When you bake sustainability-focused thinking into the plan, it’s exponentially easier to make things happen. Because if you come to me at T-minus five days asking for a sustainability plan, it's going to be really expensive. It's not going to be authentic, and it's not going to make any difference. By planning early it will probably cost less than you think, and it could even save money. And people will respect the brand and the work more.
Do you have any examples of things that you've been able to initiate because you had the time in advance?
One example is our CES presence in Las Vegas. CES is a place where brands go really big in order to stand out. Google goes big at CES; we build a two-story storytelling structure. We have a wonderful partner, Sparks, that helps design and build this. We briefed them early about our topline sustainability initiatives and goals. And they really took to heart this idea of reduce first, reuse second, and recycle third.
Specifically, at CES in 2019, we used about 170,000 pounds of steel in our structure. We were able to reduce that down to just 2,000 pounds of steel in our 2020 build, a 168,000 pound reduction. In 2019, we had 41 dump loads of trash, we were able to reduce that down to 17 dump loads of trash, more than a 50% reduction in waste. This was purely a result of signaling early, and working closely with Sparks to identify how we can reduce the amount of trash by using a reusable structure.
Instead of using steel, Sparks developed a scaffolding based solution, using rented truss clad with lightweight materials. So by giving our partner time, we were able to have a really concrete reduction year over year. Every time that we use this system, it gets cheaper and easier to execute.
As a result, we’re able to message and take credit for this positive impact. You always need to take credit. I think it's another low hanging fruit when you do the right thing: make sure people know about it.
How can companies message their positive impacts?
It can be challenging for organizations of any size to make sustainability related claims. Because when we're talking about sustainability initiatives, it's sort of like pulling the thread on a sweater. If you try to make an improvement here, you might end up finding a much larger problem over there. And it's difficult, especially at a large organization, to speak with a single and unified voice.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, and that you shouldn't try. Again, the earlier you start asking the questions, the more thoughtful an answer you can have when it comes time to say something. One of the things I like to use as a point for our initiatives within events at Google, is that our sustainability stories are in Beta. This means we're not getting this “perfect” because we don't really know what “perfect” is quite yet. We might not know how to do this in a way that's going to be the most impactful, but we're trying.
When we reuse furniture or structures year over year, that's a small but significant thing that we can message at our events. For example, we have signage on some of our seating that say, “These seats you're sitting on, you sat on them last year.” Obviously, you’re not saving the planet with reused seating. But it’s okay to take credit for something as small as this - when it’s presented in a way that is helpful and isn’t overly boastful. It’s always a good tactic to help people understand that it's a priority without beating them over the head with it.
Is there a new Google product that might be particularly relevant to our community?
Yes. We just rolled out a lot of innovations within our core products. My favorite one is using Google Flights to find carbon emission estimates on flight search results (learn more here). About 90% of events-related emissions come from flights. It was always a convoluted process to understand just how much your aviation contributes to your overall carbon footprint. Now it's really easy to understand, and everybody can use this, whether it’s for personal or professional use.
If we had to come up with a key takeaway about incorporating sustainable event management, what would it be?
When we ask our partners to start thinking about sustainability, they come back to us with a list of questions. In turn, we spend time helping them develop game plans. It’s a win-win because we get the solutions, and the partners come out ahead of the competition. So anytime you can invest your time doing a better job of explaining what you need, and understanding where people are coming from, the more you are helping them get a leg up. And I think that when we talk about sustainability ambitions and sustainability goals, it's a positive arms race, right? It’s something where we want to encourage others in our field to do better, and learn from each other.
That’s the sort of thing that we can do to inspire change at the scale we need, in a way that’s commensurate with the scale of the problem. The more we can do to inspire and encourage others to speak up, and do the work, and ask the right questions, the better.