6 Ways to Make your Event Badges and Lanyards More Sustainable
Events have a lasting impact. That is why we organize them.
But all these great events come at cost and waste, including discarded brochures, food, lanyards, and name badges. That’s also a lasting impact but certainly not a positive one. This wastage affects the environment, community, and even on your budget.
Agreed. Some of the wastage is inevitable. You cannot control how many people show up; thus, food excess can happen (although that can also be avoided to some extent. But that’s a topic for another blog). But some wastage can be easily minimized, and one such source is event badges and lanyards.
Let’s look at the top six ways to make event badges and lanyards more sustainable.
6 Ways to Make Event Badges More Eco-friendly
Embrace Onsite Badge Printing
Seasoned event planners will tell you that pre-printing name badges involve more paper wastage than printing badges onsite. To understand this, let’s take a step back and analyze the entire badge printing process.
Once you have the final list of registrants, you print badges ahead of time. You either outsource it to a professional printing company or do it in-house. Either way, traditional badge printing is costly and time-consuming. It means having no room for walk-in attendees or printing empty name badges for last-minute walk-in guests.
With these limitations, event planners seeking to eliminate event waste are embracing onsite badge printing. With technology like Eventdex, you ensure you only print badges of attendees who show up at your event. These badges are ready to be worn (as they can stick on clothes) and do not necessarily require lanyards.
Printing badges on-demand ensure no name badges end up in the trash. It’s a sustainable alternative to traditional badge printing and saves both paper and money.
Ask Sponsors to Supply Badges and Lanyards
Lanyard sponsorship is becoming one of the most popular things at large-scale modern events like tradeshows and conferences. Since lanyards are extremely visible and are often collected by attendees as momento, ask your lanyard sponsor to use their own at your events.
This way, any unused lanyards can be reused by the sponsor at their events, and you won’t have to worry about getting extra lanyards wasted.
Use Biodegradable Badges and Lanyards
The 3Rs of sustainability include recycle, reuse and reduce. Modern event planners are increasingly using environment-friendly badges that are either recycled or biodegradable.
The best environment-friendly badges are biodegradable or made of recycled material. Event organizers are opting for badge suppliers who promote green badge printing and lower environmental impact. Because of the rising awareness about green events, many badge suppliers are also accepting unused badges, lanyards, and badge holders for re-selling or recycling.
While you look for biodegradable badges, avoid green-washed offerings that falsely label products as green or eco-friendly. These labels are misleading, and as you read the fine print, you’ll notice that the badges and lanyards are made of partially recycled material.
The cost of recycling or environment-friendly badges varies from one vendor to another. Make sure to consider them while planning your event budget.
Say No to Plastic
Plastics take a long time to decompose. According to studies, plastic can decompose between 20 to 500 years, depending on its structure and material. For this reason, skip the plastic badge holder or badge lamination completely.
Instead, replace it with a strong, thick paper badge that can easily hold up for 1-2 days. If you have longer events, turn to badges that clip on the lanyard or use a biodegradable badge holder.
Print More Information on Badges
Your badges can be more than just a piece of paper with your attendee’s name and their organization. It can be innovatively used to house other information like event agendas or venue maps.
You can have a QR code that attendees can scan to view the schedule on their phones. Alternatively, to keep it simple, you can also have a venue map printed on the back side of the badge. This will eliminate the need to print cumbersome brochures and help you go green in a few ways!
Use Plantable Seed Paper Badges
What if you could turn your name badges into a beautiful pot of flowers? With plantable seed paper badges, you can adopt a fanciful solution to badge wastage. These badges have flower seeds, and flowers grow when you plant them in a pot. These badges can cost anywhere between USD 1.5 and USD 2 for a 4”x3” badge.
This is a great way to make an everlasting impression on your attendees and show that you care for the environment.
Parting Thoughts
Sustainable events are the way forward. They help you build on your organization’s great reputation and also help save resources and money. That’s why events—from sports to festivals and conferences—are embracing it. Let onsite badge printing be one of your small steps towards eliminating badge and lanyard wastage. Print badges onsite with Eventdex, a leader in onsite badge printing solutions. Contact us today to know more.