Helping businesses to reduce their exhibition carbon footprint
More than ever before, our customers are shopping for their next exhibition stand with a focus on the environmental impact their exhibiting activities are having on the planet. We are proud that we have always designed and manufactured our exhibition stands and displays with reuse, refurbishment and recycling in mind. This sustainable approach to exhibiting has often been overlooked in favour of cheaper, use once and then dispose exhibition stands and displays. Since the pandemic that mindset has shifted dramatically and as a result, the financial cost to create a sustainable exhibition stand has also dropped alongside an increase in eco-friendly display products and materials entering the marketplace. In 2023, almost every exhibition stand customer wants to know how they can make their exhibition stand more sustainable. We thought it would be helpful to share some of the eco-friendly knowledge we have. Here are our top 4 tips on how to make your exhibition stand sustainable.
1. Design for reuse
If you are in the market for a new exhibition stand, you may have contacted a handful of stand builders or marketing agencies and within a week or so, you will have a selection of attractive 3D design visuals to consider. It is easy to focus on the aesthetics of the stand design and make your buying decision on that alone, but clever design has more to offer than just good looks! An impressive exhibition stand is so much more impressive if it can be reconfigured and reused in a range of sizes and stand layouts. If you buy better, you can really buy once. An exhibition stand design with reuse at the core can be used for years to come and not limit you to the stand space and layout you can book. It isn’t just about designing the stand for easy reconfiguration, it is also about designing each stand piece so that it can be easily refurbished should an element of it get damaged or worn. Read our Protec Nutra case study here to see how their stand continues to be reused and reconfigured year after year.
2. If you can't buy quality, hire instead
Purchasing an exhibition stand that is built to a high quality and design, allowing for years of reuse and reconfiguration, is not within the marketing budgets of every business. Exhibition stand hire will provide your business with the eco-friendly credentials of a reused and recycled exhibition stand, but with a much lower price tag than buying a stand outright. You also have the added benefit of no storage costs with a hired exhibition stand. At GH Display we have been designing and building hire stands for of 45 years. This means that we have an endless selection of exhibition stand pieces for hire, making the design ambitions limitless. A hired exhibition stand from us will still be a totally bespoke exhibition stand, designed and built around your brand. Our stock of exhibition stand pieces are all designed to a high quality and with refurbishment in mind. For example, if one of our hire counters gets knocked on one side, it would have been designed with easy refurbishment at its core. All we have to do is partly dismantled the counter, replace the damaged piece with a new piece, prep, respray the whole unit and you have a brand new looking counter again.
3. Choose eco-friendly graphics
In recent months there has been a surge in the availability and variety of medias that are kinder to the environment. You can now chose to buy your exhibition graphics printed onto PVC free media. PVC media emissions are hundreds of times lower than PVC banner waste, and well below the minimum safety levels issued by EU guidelines. This means that when you do dispose of your PVC free graphics, the emissions created from its disposal are very low. Another highly sustainable graphic option is fabric media made from recycled plastics. We use this 100% recycled fabric media for lightboxes and for seamless wall graphics. The most recent addition to the eco-friendly media options and a likely game changer, is a biodegradable graphic media that is made from 100% natural fibres. It has a useable life of 2 years and decomposes within 9-12 months after disposal.
4. Choose an exhibition stand builder who is running a sustainable operation
It is no good making environmentally kind choices for your exhibition stand if the company you use to build it, isn’t also making decisions that support sustainability. Ask your exhibition stand builder how they are taking action in their workshops and print studio to reduce their carbon output and improve the sustainability of their services and products. At GH Display we are continuously reviewing our operations to ensure everything we do is done in the most efficient and environmentally friendly way. Our Cambridgeshire based site it powdered by solar panels meaning everything that we manufacturer on-site has been done so using electricity that we have generated ourselves. We reuse, recycle and refurbish 90% of the exhibition stand components we manufacturer for hire. As standard we use either PVC free, 100% recycled or biodegradable graphics for our custom built exhibition stands and hired exhibition stands. We no longer use solvent based paints and instead use water based paints in our spray booth. We have installed a new LED lighting system across our whole site that is not only more effective for our team, but runs our lighting at 90% more efficiency.
