 Aloha, I'm Kirsten Baumgart-Turner and this is Sustainable Hawai'i, airing live every Tuesday from noon to 12.30 at the Think Tech Hawai'i Studio in downtown Honolulu. During the first 10 days of this month, Hawai'i hosted the World Conservation Congress, held for the first time on U.S. soil. Over 10,000 people from around the world and Hawai'i converged at the Convention Center for four days of workshops and presentations, a day of excursions around the islands, and four days of deliberations in the members assembly, setting the worldwide conservation agenda for the next four years. Through a variety of venues, including knowledge cafes, workshops, conservation cases, and high-level dialogues, the forum provided the opportunity for individual countries, regions, and transnational partnerships to showcase their innovative, scalable initiatives and solutions to issues ranging from deforestation, ocean acidification, protection against invasive species, and international trafficking in endangered wild animals. The more than 1,200 forum events ran for 12 hours each day from 7 in the morning until 9 at night. The final four-day members assembly convened the IUCN's 1,300-plus member organizations to collectively decide on actions over the next four years to address the most pressing and often controversial conservation and sustainable development challenges. The assembly produced what are being called the Hawai'i commitments, which address issues such as sustaining world food supplies, maintaining the health of the oceans, wildlife trafficking, engaging with the private sector, and building resilience to climate change. The Hawai'i commitments highlight nature-based solutions to climate change, such as the restoration of forests and peatlands as essential components of climate mitigation and adaptation. The question I want to discuss today is how green was this conference that was all about keeping our planet green? On March 22, Jennifer Milholland, president of Styrophobia, joined me on this show to talk about whether or not mega-gatherings like this one could be sustainable. She was part of the green team that coordinated the efforts to make the first-ever World Conservation Congress held on U.S. soil be the most sustainable World Conservation Congress ever. Welcome back, Jennifer. Thank you for having me. It's always delightful to have you. I love engaging your intellect. And particularly, we want to hear about your experience in trying to make this the greenest event ever for the Congress and for Hawai'i. Tell me a little bit about the green team and how it got formed. Okay. So the green team was formed initially because so back in four years ago when the event was the World Conservation Congress was held in Jeju, there wasn't a green team. There weren't there wasn't a ton of focus on sustainability measures, kind of like we discussed at the last last time I was here that often gets overlooked. But there was so much waste. There was over a million copies of paper printed on site. There was a ton of waste created. So there was Alexander Peterson who organized logistics for this conservation Congress. She really wanted to focus on greening the events. Yeah, we had her on the show. Oh, great. Okay. So she's very passionate. And she says we are forming this green team. We didn't have a budget. A lot of other teams had budgets. We had no budget. We had a lot of ideas and some pushback about trying to get ahead of ourselves. But you know, we propose that we, you know, green hotels, we look at zero waste options. We look at plastic reductions, go plastic free. And when the organizers, the higher up organizers of IUCN saw everything we wanted to do, they were like, all right, well, okay, we want to go for the world class level of certification for green events, which is called ISO certification. This is really hard to get. Like the Paris talks, the Paris climate talks, they tried to get ISO certification. They didn't get it. So this is a very prestigious certification. So we reformed and we've been meeting for over a year to kind of walk through, like, what do we address? Like, what's possible? What's not possible? Where do we compromise? What's unacceptable? So we had a lot of really good conversations. And like I mentioned, it was hotel members, people from Green Business Program and D-Bed representing hotels. We had... D-Bed being the State Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. Yes. Thank you. Hawaii Foundation is Jack Johnson and Kim Johnson's foundation focusing on plastic-free. I joined from Syrophobia to kind of focus on zero-waste efforts. And there were many other members from Transportation and et cetera that focused. So it was cross-sector, state, city and county of Honolulu, non-governmental institutions, and private sector companies like the hotel and visitor industry? Yep. There's a whole bunch of us. We all focus on the objective of making this event as green as possible and not doing any greenwashing. Like, we want a real tangible impact. Greenwashing meaning not talking the talk, but walking the walk. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. So we were pretty thrilled with how things turned out. Well tell me a little bit about it. How'd you do with paper? Paper was pretty incredible. At Jeju last year, sorry, four years ago, they... Jeju in Korea. Korea, yes. That was when the last World Conservation Congress was held. They printed over a million copies on site. That's not even including paper and materials that were shipped to the event, but just on site just to give some form of metric. And shipping to the event would have had all kinds of other unsustainable impacts. Exactly. Okay. So but just as a... For sake of comparison, just copies made on site, about a million copies over the course of the event. So in comparison, this time around, a lot of this gets credited to Alexandra. She's very passionate about it. We've got 30,000 copies. So it's a very, very large decrease. Huge reduction. And it just kind of reminds us that it's very possible you just have to set the intention and stick to it. So what are some of the ways in which that intention was set and you carried it out? I mean, how did you keep people at the task of reduction? Because the event itself for the attendees was already geared towards no paper. So they're... Instead of printing books and libraries and things like that, they just made QR codes. So there was two sections. One was the attendee-facing side where the schedules weren't printed out. Everything was online. Everyone's encouraged to have a mobile app. And the mobile app was downloadable on your cell phone so that everybody could just pull out their cell phone and look at the program and find the workshops. I know that had some glitches. Some glitches, yes. Quite a few. But it was a first. It was. And it was a huge opportunity for the convention center to try it. And if you couldn't get it on your phone, they had many stations where there's laptop setup where you could just look it up online. Like I said, the libraries that they had, where they wanted people to be able to read the different publications, they were pictures of the publication with a QR code. So instead of printing thousands and thousands of pages for every publication, those are all saved by having something you could look up yourself. So you just had to download the QR code. You did. And then put your cell phone on the screen and the document would pop up. And that's the attendee-facing side. On the IUCN, so IUCN ended up bringing a fair bit of staff. So as you can imagine throughout the event, they have to print a lot. Well, they normally would have to print a lot themselves. So they kind of have a back working area. But instead, they were given very strict instructions that only the highest priority things had to be printed. And someone was always monitoring it. So it's just kind of reinforcing, like, this is the goal we've set, stick to it. And we all know that the most difficult thing about sustainability is changing behaviors. And changing behaviors at a mega event that takes phenomenal coordination when you have over 160 countries participating would be an insurmountable task you would think. But they did it. They did it. And I think that's a really important point that you're making because I think a lot of us have had these conversations about when you approach things like zero waste, the immediate reaction is that's not possible. Like, come on, you're, be serious. And it's frustrating because especially going through this year-long conversation about what we can do, it was very apparent that we could have gone zero waste. But in the process, you look at what are the concessions you have to make in terms of, OK, we can do that, but it's going to cost like tens of thousands of more dollars in labor or it's going to cost more in this regard. So I never want to ever hear anyone say that zero waste is impossible. It's just a matter of how much it costs and how much labor you need. Did it actually cost a great deal more? And was it a great deal more labor? It would have if we'd gone fully zero waste. The event didn't end up being fully zero waste. What would be the additional labor costs? So for example, originally we, and this is actually a good segue into what I was going to talk about too, is that along the progression of the discussions we talked about, OK, we want to go zero waste. We don't, you want to use any single use items. So no single use utensils, no single use plates, no single use cups, anything. And we were looking at whether or not the convention center has the capacity to wash all those things. But they ended up deciding to go concession. So instead of the phase where your staff can collect the plates, can collect everything and put it in a dishwasher, when you have concessions, everything you're selling goes off, just goes off. It's very, I shouldn't say impossible. It's difficult to collect. So had we decided that, had they decided that they wanted to do reusable items for everything given out, there would have had to have been bins around the entire convention center, which is three floors, huge exhibit halls, and there would have had to have been probably, I would estimate, at least 50 extra staff paid to go around and collect all the bins. So the extra labor cost wasn't associated with the paper being produced in documents that was associated with the food delivery system. So that's just an example of where additional costs would come in. And another additional cost would be if we want to go compostable products, those cost more than single use plastic, conventional plastics. But if we look at the life cycle cost of those products and the impacts on society, we may figure out that they're less costly. Absolutely, absolutely. When you look at true costs, they're by far less costly. So maybe that's something we need to build into our future events is looking at the true cost, looking at the life cycle cost, instead of the immediate upfront cost. And that's always the issue. That is absolutely true. And I think that's something we tried very hard to do was point out to IUCN who's making these decisions about purchasing that true cost wise, what you're talking about in terms of taking into account externalized costs and environmental impact, social impact, those costs outweigh the immediate cost. But it's the challenges communicating that to the people that are signing the checks and being like, this matters a great deal. But unfortunately, we ended up not using, for just talking about the waste component, we ended up not using reusables because they looked at the cost figures for having more staff to collect the utensils and the plates and everything. And they're like, we don't have the budget for that. So there's definitely budgetary considerations. But by no means impossible. Well, one of the things that was exciting to see how many volunteers there were, might some of those positions being taken up and volunteers or were there issues that precluded that from happening? That's a good question. There were issues that precluded that. The convention center, given the, what's not notoriety, but given the fact that there were a lot of high level dignitaries and presidents and prime ministers and senior figures and governments, there was a lot of security concerns. So initially, we had a lot of volunteers planned out, for example, for our zero waste bins to make sure the contamination is low. Then we start looking at security clearance concerns. Like who can get in, who can get in where. So using volunteers for a lot of that collection to go in the back of the house to the convention center ended up not being possible. We can plan that for future events that we don't have high level security requirements. Absolutely. Terrific. And that was kind of the point is like, I wanted to get ambitious when we proposed all these for, and if we can do it for this, then we learn everything we can and apply it to much smaller events. Absolutely. Well, I know one of the major projects that you were working on was a composting pilot. So tell me how that went. Okay. It did not go as planned, totally, for a few different reasons. But I can tell you flat out that I'm really happy with the way it turned out because we still managed to capture about 3,000 pounds of compostable material. 3,000 pounds. That's significant. And that's, it is. And we ended up not being able to capture everything. We're probably looking at some of the contamination and things not getting put in the right bins. Probably only have about 35% capture rate. So a lot more could have been captured because everything at the event, because it was plastic free, everything was compostable. Everything. Well, a 35% capture rate for a first time effort, I would say is a win. Thank you. Well, we're going to go to a break. And when we come back, I want to hear more details about how this worked, didn't work, and what are the lessons. We'll be right back with Jennifer and talking about the sustainability of the World Conservation Congress. Hi, I'm Tyler Suboda. And I was actually a guest host on Carl Campania's Think Tech Hawaii show Movers, Shakers, and Reformers. And I think you should tune in every Wednesday to find out more about what it is. That's all. Take care. Looking to energize your Friday afternoon? Tune in to Stand the Energy Man at 12 noon. Aloha Friday here on Think Tech Hawaii. Good afternoon. Howard Wiig, codegreenthinktechhawaii.com. I appear on Mondays at three o'clock and my gig is energy efficiency doing more with less. It's the most cost effective way that we in Hawaii are going to achieve 100% clean energy by the year 2045. I look forward to being with you. Aloha. Hi, we're back with Jennifer Mulholland talking about the conservation measures at the World Conservation Congress. So we were just talking about the composting program. And I know that there was a pilot that was very exciting for how to do it better. Tell me how it usually happens at a conference so we can compare. Sure. So specifically the Hawaii Convention Center, they are beholden to a city and county ordinance that requires them to divert their food waste after a cycle it. So one aspect is any food waste that is contained, that's taken up from the kitchen, it's like pre-consumer waste like food scraps you chop before it goes into a meal. And anything they scrape off buffet plates get picked up by eco feed. So that's pre-human contact with the customer. And post-consumer, especially when typically only with a buffet. So if a person finishes their meal they hand it back to the staff, staff would actually scrape the remaining food waste into a collection bin. So collectively that amount of food waste would normally go to eco feed and they take it to Piggeries. Eco feed is a local company? It is, yes. They basically are a food waste hauler. They're intermediary between the Piggeries and food waste generators. For food that's still edible, it's called quality edibles, they are contracted with a low-haul harvest to pick up meals. So it still goes to feed the hungry. So it goes to food banks as well as other nonprofit, private, volunteer, distribution organizations. Exactly, and the intention being to not waste anything. That if it can be eaten, if it can be fed to livestock, that's a higher and better use. So it's a wonderful regulation that the city and county requires. Yes, coincidentally, that we would like to expand statewide. And anything that ends up in the trash, it could be from the concessions, from any material coming in, that gets into H-Power. Which is our incineration facility. Which is our incineration facility. So for this event, on the green team, we're like, initially we're like, OK, we want to go zero waste. What does that look like? And a lot of times the answer is, you recapture your organic materials and send it to composting facilities. So we in Oahu and Hawaii in general do not have a municipal-scale composting facility that can handle the compostable products that can handle food waste all at once. We do have Hawaiian Earth products up in Oahiwa. They have the city and county contract to do green waste. But that's it. They can take a little bit of food waste, but they're not set up to take large amounts of food waste. So what would this look like if we did have it? So we do have a couple pictures. So this is an example of what a positively aerated composting facility would be like. So those are called windrows. And it's a mix of green waste, brown waste, so like tree trimmings and things like that. Food waste, basically what happens is you can see on the left there those little stripes. That's where air is forced upward. And it's typically mixed. So it's, sorry, excuse me, this particular example is not mixed. So that would keep it from going anaerobic, which causes things to rot, all kinds of problems. And that looks like it's on the mainland somewhere where it's cold, because there's no leaves on the trees. Correct, yeah. So that's just an example of what a one facility would look like. And if we can go to the next slide, this is an example of one composting facility that has a windrow turner. So this is one that's not on a concrete slab. They have the windrow set out of the compostable material and a giant machine comes and turns it manually. Well, I'd like that in my backyard, because it's backbreaking to turn our compost. It is, absolutely. And another example, if we can go to the next one, this is an in-vessel composting system. So this is the benefit of this that it's self-contained. And you can put all kinds of things in it that are compostable. You can put compostable products. You can put compostable plastics. So we've ever seen the compostable forks and things like that. Those are rated to 200 degrees, typically. So you need to put those in that kind of machine. And the off-gassing of the material is what creates the heat. There's no additional heat added. No additional heat added. It does require some electricity. Benefits being that you can put a lot of materials in there and it's self-contained. Downsides are that both of the examples are show, or sorry, all three of the examples we're showing are very labor-intensive. They're operation maintenance intensive. So it's a lot of infrastructure associated, but it's still very expensive. So what we wanted to do was I was like, I want to go zero waste. And I wanted the materials to get to farmers so we can support local agriculture. Because one of the biggest things that plagues farmers is the cost of amendments. You have to ship in a lot of fertilizers, ship in compost, things like that. So the hope would be that if we can create a system, create a model where they can create their own amendments by food waste that we could recapture from events, then we can be pretty much a game changer. So what did that look like this time? So, thank you for asking. Oh, I'm sorry, I meant to reference this slide before. So this is an example of a picture from Kupu, this is from the Piggeries where it goes to. If there is a picture of the small-scale compost, let me just point out, though, that that's the food waste that you were talking about that gets scraped off and it goes to Piggeries. Got it. So now you were talking about this. Sure. So this is an example of what I would consider a small-scale facility. This is just a sample. This is like a 70-foot by 16-foot facility, so very small compared to the large-scale facilities. And you can kind of see that in each bay, that's where they would mix these small batches of compost. And where is this one located? This is over in Waimanala. This is actually not a composting facility. This is a material storage bay, but I wanted to kind of give a sense of scale and proportion. So the difference in here being that instead of those gigantic, expensive wind returners, you have maybe a small bobcat or you can even turn it by hand. This actually looks like a slightly larger version than the composting facility at Kampukulitia. So we do have them around the island. All right. But not that big. Not that big, yeah. So the difference being in these, and you can also show one more where they're turning the manual, yeah. So you can kind of see, so these piles, they still get turned, but it's happening on a smaller scale. So the reason I wanted to look to this is because I wanted to see if we can create a compost diversion model for food waste generators like the Convention Center that require far less cost. Because one very common objection to composting facilities here is that it just costs too much. Like these are millions of millions, multi-million dollar facilities. Well, this smaller one would not be multi-million. It would not be multi-million. However, the high cost in Hawaii would be the land and the opportunity cost of using that land for something else. Right. And we know lease rates are so high here. Which is one of the reasons I wanted to target, not target, that sounds terrible. I wanted to work with farmers as a model because they already have the land. They're already working on it. They're already composting, but I wanted to give them the option if they wanted it to expand their program to be able to receive food waste. So we wanted to kind of take this opportunity to try it. See if the model would work. So what happened? So what happened? Okay, so a lot of it came down to permitting. So we, and I'll just say like, we worked with the Convention Center staff. They were incredibly supportive. They wanted to try this. They want to put in place these systems. And so we worked on all the logistics about when we picked up where, where the bins go, what are signs going to look like. And I worked with the farmers on what, when we're going to receive it. But in order to legally take, or in order to legally compost the food waste and the compostable products on site, we have to have a Department of Health permit. And that, to be candid, took me far longer to write than I would have ever imagined. And I, it's- The permit application. The permit application, yes. It took me over a year to write. So it's this thick? It's 218 pages. Goodness. Yeah. So I have to fill out, as a small scale facility, like we wanted to do for this pilot, we have to fill out the same application as Hawaiian Air's products. Oh my goodness. So even, and so basically in the application, you have to address all kinds of large scale issues and risk, which in my opinion, are not nowhere near as probable in a small scale operation. So that was, that was definitely revealed in the process of we need to revisit how our, how our permitting is done for small scale farmers that may want to do a program like this. So in, what would you do to make that work next time? Make. So in other words, you'd start the permitting process earlier. You, I assume you didn't get the permit. The permit did not come through in time. So, sorry. Yeah, no. So, so you had the bins, you were ready to collect, but you weren't able to take the product off site. Is that it? Well, no. So we were actually, when it became clear that we were not going to be able to take the food, the food waste was the big component. Couldn't take their food waste. So we rescheduled eco feeds. Eco feed picked up the food waste anyway. So that still got sent to Piggeries, but we were not able to collect it. So we kept the plan in place to collect all of the compostable material. Well, let's see some of that material that you collected and tell me what happened with it. Oh, so this is, so what's showing now is a, is a reusable spork. That was, I brought that in because we looked at initially not using compostable materials at all, single, okay, single use materials at all. So that's, that's a reasonable spork we looked at using. So if, can we go to the contamination side? Number 12, I think in your list, there you go. So we, we still collected all the material because we wanted to get the data. We wanted to find out how much compostable material we actually creating. So what, what ended up happening was that we ended up with a lot of contamination. One reason for this could be that we could have had better signage. We could have, we didn't end up getting the food monitors for each bin that we wanted. So we're working on the- The food monitors being a person at the bin. A person at the bin. Directing people. So the participants weren't as savvy as we'd hoped. Yes, it was a huge surprise. One of the things we'd reasoned was that like, these attendees, they're motivated, they are excited. They're gonna get it. Yeah. And it turns out that there was probably close to 50% contamination. Wow, well that's a huge juxtaposition between those coming to address the big picture conservation issues, not paying attention to the small details of what it takes to really conserve. It was, and it was especially jarring being one of the people that was sorting the material to gather the data was that the literal theme of the event was planted at a crossroads. Every talk, every discussion was centered around urgency. Right. And it really hit home for me that there is a very large disconnect that we need to work on collectively between, we gotta fix things on a big level versus like what are my actual day-to-day behaviors have the impact? Because we all know that unless we're personally doing it at home one by one, it's not gonna change. And this is a case like voting that each vote counts and each person's action counts tremendously. Right, so and just to give one example, we collected, we categorized all the single use utensils. Cause they're compostable, but there's single use utensils that only got used once. And they were, this is an example of better signage that we could have had. Do we have the utensils? Yeah, we wanna look at, those are the kinds of utensils that you should have had, what you should have could have? These are compostable products that we ended up using. So it's still better than single use plastics. Everything was compostable. But I wanted to see if we could show the picture of the bins with the single use compostable utensils because it really hit home for me that we, yeah, here we go. That was all the, sorry, that was probably 35% of the composted utensils that were used at the event. That's close to 200 pounds. And you know how little a single use fork weighs. Close to 200 pounds of single use items. And it really hit home for me. Why, where was the outrage? Where was the demand? Where was the behavior shift of like, oh, they're serving single use items. Even if they're compostable, I'm gonna bring my own utensil. Or I'm gonna use my own cup. So that really. They were very good about the water issues. They noticed a lot of people walking around with water bottles. And then the convention center has the refillable water stations, which was excellent. But then in the evenings, I saw everyone with the plastic cups with their beer and wine. And those ended up in what you saw was non discernible compostable things all plunged into water. So it really hit home for me that like, yes, we did better. These were the actual bins. These were the actual bins. And so this kind of highlights that how we, you saw earlier the signage where there's samples of what should go where. But in this case, for the, what actually happened in the convention center, the signage was a bit more muted. It was more. It was very muted. And we noticed in that picture that it was very distant from where the people actually were. So you had to seek out those bins and they weren't in the traffic flow. So people were in a hurry between 1,200 different conferences and workshops and looking for a place to chuck their stuff. So that's another thing we've learned. We've run out of time. We're clearly gonna have to have another show to talk about this more. You're always full of great information. And we're definitely going to learn this for our future conferences, but be very happy with the gains that we did make. Yes, absolutely. Thank you for coming. A lot of lessons. And please join us next Tuesday on Sustainable Hawaii at 12 noon.