Amy Sims

Nothing gets the pulse racing like a good goody bag. Checking in to an event you spy the overstuffed beauties gathered by the door, waiting to go home with you after the schmoozing has ceased.

While not all business events and corporate parties offer such bounty, it’s safe to say you’ll at least get a branded pen, a pen that you probably don’t need and will most likely live out the rest of its days in your desk drawer nestled between paper clips and sugar packets.

Which leads me to the first and foremost tip for procuring green giveaways for events – stop and think – do the invitees really need and/or want these items? Will they just toss it in the bin or grumble ‘what a waste’? If the answer is yes then by all means, read on…

Good news, it’s becoming quite easy to procure a plethora of more eco-friendly products when hosting a business event. From t-shirts to pencils to chocolate bars there is a great selection of green alternatives to now choose from.

Not only will your event be more environmentally friendly, your guests will undoubtedly appreciate that you cared enough to make smart sustainable choices.

Here are some suggestions to help you start sourcing more sustainable event products:

Stationary and merchandise for branding

The Green Stationary Company offers a selection of recycled and bio-degradable stationary materials, including a range of pens and pencils made from recycled milk bottles, vending cups, and computer cases. If you’d like to brand your corporate freebies they also have a wide range of products that can have your own artwork printed on them, including notepads, carrier bags, T-shirts and mouse mats.

Similarly, Remarkable sells personalised stationary made only from UK waste: pencil cases and coasters made from recycled tyres, rulers made from recycled CD cases, and sticky notes made from 100 per cent post-consumer waste paper. And surely you can’t pass up the WEEE pen range, which includes white pens made from recycled white goods and black pens made from recycled game consoles.

Moonlight Business Gifts, meanwhile, has personalised key rings, badges, jumbo paperclips and magnets made from recycled vending cups. Their line of recycled t-shirts is made from 50 per cent recycled cotton and 50 per cent recycled PET. The company is also branching out into novelty corporate gifts in the form their knobbly wooden USB memory stick, which can be laser engraved.

Green gadgets

For conference organisers who want to offer giveaways that are a bit more memorable, or perhaps just a bit more expensive, there are now plenty of green gadget companies out there offering a raft of options.

Nigel’s Eco Store is brilliant for a selection of eco-friendly gifts including the sleek, portable Solio solo charger which powers iPods, mobile devices, and the like. It also offers a greenish version of the iPod, in the form of the Wind up Media Player, which give you 40 minutes of play time for every minute you wind it up.

Food and Drink

The other perennial feature of conference goody bags alongside the various stationary knick knacks is a snack to eat on the journey home. Here again there are plenty of green alternatives currently targeting the event market.

Divine Chocolate launched the first ever Fairtrade chocolate bar in the UK market and has since branched out into great brownies, chocolate muffins, and of course a wider range of chocolate bars.

Fairtrade wholesalers meanwhile are also available in the form of Traidcraft and Premcrest, both of which sell Fairtrade products including snacks and biscuits, chocolate, hot and cold drinks. Traidcraft also sells Fairtrade ‘bags for life’ that offer a clean slate for you to stamp with your preferred brand or message.

When providing food at the event itself setting out jugs of chilled tap water with reusable glasses is a much better option than distributing bottled water and sends a visible sign that yours is a green event. But if you simply must have bottled water at your function there are some ethically-minded options including Belu, One Water, Frank, and Thirsty Planet.

Of course, the type of green freebies you want to offer depends largely on the type of event you are hosting and it always pays to know your audience: suited investment bankers at a cleantech conference are unlikely to appreciate a worm factory as much as gardeners at a horticultural event, for example. But there is now such a wide range of sustainable options available, from fair-trade footballs to solar powered bike lights, that it is possible to make green goody bags a part of almost any conference and if you do pick the right gifts it has the potential to genuinely reinforce your company’s image as an environmentally responsible operator.