Often praised for its bike culture, sustainable architecture and clean harbour water, Copenhagen has much to offer eco-conscious travellers. With its many eco-certified hotels and venues, the Danish capital is also the place to go for meeting planners looking to organise meetings with a smaller CO2 footprint.
Today, reducing the carbon footprint of meetings and events involves much more than just skipping plastic cups and straws. It’s about minimising waste, cutting back on meat, reducing energy consumption, choosing public transport over taxis and much more. And with research showing that travel and tourism, including transportation, food consumption, and accommodation, is responsible for a large percentage of the world’s CO2 emissions, meeting planners can make a difference by prioritising eco-friendly options.
Copenhagen is often named a trailblazer in sustainability thanks to its clean harbour water, bicycle culture, sustainable urban design and innovative restaurants that favour local and green produce. The city has nearly 550 km of designated bike paths; it currently holds the title of World Capital of Architecture, and Michelin-starred restaurants like Alchemist, Geranium and Noma continue to elevate sustainable gastronomy.
The same commitment to sustainability permeates the city’s meetings and events industry, where local suppliers have been working strategically to reduce their carbon footprint for years – some even for decades. While the city’s hotel capacity has increased significantly over the last few years, the number of eco-certified rooms is still high, close to 70 %. Looking at venues, 91% of the larger conference facilities hold a third-party eco-certification. Among the frontrunners are Bellagroup, which owns a string of hotels and northern Europe’s largest congress centre, Bella Center Copenhagen. At the start of the year, Bellagroup inaugurated a solar park the size of two football fields on the roof of the congress building. The 16,000-square-meter park not only helps reduce the venue’s total energy consumption significantly but also stands as a shining example of what is possible if venues and other meeting suppliers think outside the box.
Bellagroup also owns one of the world’s greenest hotels, Crowne Plaza Copenhagen Towers, which runs on 100 per cent renewable energy, 10 per cent of which comes from its own solar cells.
No food wasted
Food waste is a key focus at Bellagroup and many other suppliers like the Scandic Spectrum Hotel, which is home to Restaurant Ansvar. Ansvar translates to ‘responsibility’, and taking its responsibility seriously is at the core of everything the restaurant does. The chefs at Ansvar work with flexible menus that allow them to use any left-over products in new dishes. Vegetable scraps are turned into purees and bases; whatever is left is turned into biofuel.
In collaboration with the Northwest microbrewery, BRØL, the restaurant has created its own beer brewed with excess bread from different Scandic hotels, including Spectrum. The bread is frozen and gets picked up monthly from the hotels and then crumbled and prepared for brewing. Here, it replaces 25-35% of the malt that would otherwise have been used. When ready, the beer is then bottled in recycled bottles with labels made from recycled paper and delivered to Ansvar, where it is served with the food.
Other hotels and restaurants with a big focus on food waste include Hotel Kong Arthur and Hotel Villa Copenhagen and the LOCA Group, which owns some of Copenhagen’s most popular restaurants, Studio, Almanak and Kilden i Haven.
While there are plenty of options to go green, as an outsider it can be difficult to figure out where to start. This is where the Copenhagen Convention Bureau (Copenhagen CVB) enters the picture. As the official convention bureau of the greater Copenhagen area, Copenhagen CVB is your one-point entry for everything you need to make your event in Copenhagen a success.
And it starts with the planning phase. Copenhagen CVB has developed a free-of-charge sustainability guide that helps meeting planners reduce the C02 footprint of their upcoming event in Copenhagen. From catering to transport, the Copenhagen Sustainability Guide can help you identify your ambitions and how these can contribute to a reduction in C02 and to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. By using the guide, it becomes very clear and tangible for planners what impact their choice of venue, food, transportation, and accommodation have on their next meeting in Copenhagen.
4 ways for meeting planners to leave a lighter footprint in Copenhagen
1 – Park the car
Getting to and around Copenhagen is easy. The city’s award-winning airport is just 12 minutes by public transport from the city centre, and once you’re in the city, everything is connected. Take your pick from travel on foot, by bike, bus, train or metro, and you and your delegates will find it easy to get from hotel to event venue in no time.
2 – Check in to an eco-certified accommodation
With almost two-thirds of Copenhagen’s hotel rooms being eco-certified, it’s not hard to find hotels that are committed to the green agenda. In fact, most hotels are committed to reducing energy and water consumption, minimising waste, introducing organic produce and creating a healthy environment in which to work and stay.
One of these is the Guldsmeden hotel chain, which has been working with sustainability since its beginning in 1999. Initiatives include the use of organic, local and sustainable produce and Orbital Systems showers developed by none other than NASA to recycle the water being used.
Scandinavia’s largest hotel chain, Scandic, has been working to reduce its carbon footprint since 1993, looking at its environmental impact, the food it serves, the way it cleans and the way it furnishes its hotels. All Danish Scandic hotels are certified with the Nordic Swan Ecolabel, which means that the hotels have to meet a number of tough requirements concerning energy consumption, CO2-emission, food waste, waste sorting, water consumption, and eco-labelled products for cleaning.
3 – Choose an eco-certified venue
The choice of venue is important when it comes to reducing the carbon footprint of your meeting.
Copenhagen Convention Bureau has made it easy for planners to find venues with a green profile with their Meetingplanner guide. Among the venues that are eco-certified are Copenhagen’s Circus Building and the Danish Architecture Center (DAC).
The Circus Building is the oldest of its kind in Europe, which is equally fascinating and challenging when it comes to implementing sustainable practices and making the building more energy efficient. Nevertheless, the venue recently became Green Key certified thanks to a long list of actions and initiatives. The venue replaced all the oil lamps on the tables in its Grand Circus Hall with LED lamps designed by world-famous designer Verner Panton, who redecorated the building back in the 80s. The Wallmans team also changed the way they set the tables for the guests, going from two to one wine glass per guest to minimise the cleaning and washing up, saving water and electricity.
At DAC, they work with sustainability in a variety of ways and through a number of focus areas, such as Food and Beverage, recycling and storytelling. The food served at the café is organic and seasonal, focusing on animal welfare, while upcycling and the reuse of displays are a big part of the DAC exhibitions. Find more eco-certified venues here.
4 – Choose team-building activities with a green conscience
Whether you’re here for business or leisure, the world’s second-oldest amusement park, Tivoli, is a must-visit. It’s the perfect place for team building and other incentive activities.
And while it may have celebrated its 180th anniversary last year, there’s nothing dated about Tivoli and its commitment to sustainability. In 2022, it became the first amusement park in Denmark to receive the “green attraction” certification. Efforts include plant-based meal options at all of its restaurants, the use of LED lighting to reduce its total energy consumption and working with smart water solutions to reduce its overall water usage.
The park was also the first amusement park in the world to introduce a refundable cup system designed to limit the amount of disposable packaging. In practice, Tivoli serves its beverages in reusable cups and charges an extra 5 DKK, which is then refunded when the empty cup is deposited at one of its reverse vending machines.
In 2022, Tivoli made a power purchase agreement with a Danish renewables company to ensure that Tivoli’s electricity consumption is covered by renewable energy.
For more information about Copenhagen as a green meeting destination, please visit www.copenhagencvb.com
Further reading on Sublime Magazine:
COPENHAGEN: FROM WASTE TO WONDERFUL
HOW TO GET AROUND SUSTAINABLY IN COPENHAGEN
