Emota

The exhibition landscape is shaped by short-use builds and material-heavy production. It’s also led by scale, with Emota Global Exhibitions & Environments 65-strong team creating more than 300 exhibition booths a year across 200 global congresses for 27 clients. The US-UK baked team needed a repeatable business as usual operating model to streamline its process, and the answer was Enviroplan. This fresh methodology helped bring sustainability into the earliest creative conversations and kept it central through design, production, logistics, audience engagement and dismantle.

Enviroplan is built around circularity: build less, build to last, build cleverly and build to reuse. That thinking allowed Emota to produce modular booths for multi-year use, global toolkits for hundreds of congresses and to deliver striking material innovation, including use of recycled and recyclable structural cardboard developed with a key supplier. It resulted in effective and efficient exhibition stands, including a cardboard booth with a carbon footprint reduced from 2.4 to just 0.62 tonnes. Sustainability is at the heart of Enviroplan processes: project leaders, designers, content teams and technical specialists can work from shared frameworks, training and practical toolkits, while clients and suppliers are brought into the process for consistency. The team also uses the TRACE measurement platform and the Best Overall Sustainability Solution (BOSS), while being aligned with ISO 20121, GRI and the GHG Protocol standards.

The results were clear and confident and an indication of impact at scale. Across its projects, Emota has cited up to 70% carbon reduction, waste reduction of 98.44%, material reuse, repurposing or donation rates as high as 96.8%, and cost savings of up to 40%. With Enviroplan now rolled out across 90% of Emota's exhibition work, the judges praised how the team is reshaping exhibition practices.