The Rimini Meeting, a major event with over 800,000 attendees, is embarking on a sustainability journey with the support of Conai. LifeGate will be there to cover it.
From 18 to 24 August, the Meeting for Friendship among Peoples returns to Rimini, celebrating its fortieth edition this year and renewing its commitment to becoming greener. This is thanks to REmini2020, a three-year programme launched with the support of Conai (Consorzio Nazionale Imballaggi) which, with the 2019 edition, reaches its halfway point. The idea is to monitor the performance of this major event across four areas (circular economy, energy, food and mobility), progressively improving them until the event can be rightfully called "sustainable".
2019 is an important year for the Meeting for Friendship among Peoples, as it reaches the symbolic milestone of forty editions. It is an event that aims to stimulate reflection and open dialogue on topics that are not only religious but also political, cultural and artistic. And now ecological, too. The Meeting is held every year in the city of Rimini in the second half of August and presents itself as "a gathering of people of different faiths and cultures", where "peace, coexistence and friendship among peoples can be built". It is a meeting point for political and institutional figures, managers of large companies, religious representatives, intellectuals, artists and sportspeople. The title chosen for the 2019 edition is "your name was born from what you gazed upon".
A quick overview of the figures is enough to grasp the scale of this event. In 2018, over 800,000 attendances were recorded, along with around 170 partners and sponsors and approximately 600 accredited journalists. Over the course of the week, nearly 250 conferences, workshops and round tables took place, with 627 speakers taking the stage. There were 14 exhibitions and educational displays, and 18 performances spanning music, theatre, dance, cabaret and cinema. All of this took place across the 130,000 square metres set up at the Rimini Expo Centre, as well as in other venues scattered across the city, including the Teatro Novelli.
Making it possible to manage such an enormous flow of visitors is the work of a staff divided into 14 departments, supported by no fewer than 2,527 volunteers.
Enrico Giovannini, spokesperson for Asvis (Alleanza italiana per lo sviluppo sostenibile), entrepreneur and former television presenter Andrea Pezzi, director of the Istituto per gli studi di politica internazionale Paolo Magri, and "enlightened" entrepreneur Brunello Cucinelli. These are some of the figures we at LifeGate met during last year's edition to discuss sustainability from many different angles. This year, too, we will be in Rimini for a multi-voiced account told through images and words, which you will also be able to follow on social media.
2018 was year zero of this journey, which unfolds in several directions and involves many strategic and operational changes. There is a fully fledged sustainability strategy, developed by Conai, the national consortium for the recycling and recovery of packaging waste, which will also be present on site as an exhibitor. For Conai, this represents an ambitious challenge: tackling the issue of sustainability at large events with a 360-degree approach.
As the principles of the circular economy dictate, it is time to abandon the "produce, use and discard" model and ensure that, even at the design stage of a product, consideration is given to the fact that it will need to be repaired, reused or correctly recycled. The Rimini Meeting therefore pledges to tackle the waste problem on two levels: upstream, by favouring supplies that minimise the production of non-recyclable waste; and downstream, by promoting separate waste collection at the exhibition site before, during and after the event.
With its low-environmental-impact design, the Rimini Expo Centre already holds Iso 14001 and Ohsas 18001 environmental certifications. A share of energy is produced on site through a number of photovoltaic systems, and in 2017 the lighting systems were upgraded in favour of low-energy solutions, using natural light or LEDs. Among other things, the REmini2020 project plans to monitor consumption even more precisely and intervene in a targeted manner to optimise it. In this process, the contribution of Italian Exhibition Group, the company that manages the Rimini Expo Centre, is essential.
Bringing together such an enormous number of people in the same place also means having to provide hundreds of thousands of meals, drinks and coffees. Selecting local suppliers, composing menus based on organic produce, farmed and fished sustainably, and sourced locally wherever possible: all of these choices can truly make a difference.
Thanks to collaboration with Banco Alimentare, in 2018 all food produced but not consumed by the central catering service and five other refreshment points inside the expo centre was donated to the mensa of the Associazione San Antonio per i Poveri. This amounted to 520 first courses, 470 main courses, 410 side dishes, more than 40 kilograms of focaccia and 250 portions of mixed products — a total of 287.5 kilograms of perfectly good food that would otherwise have gone to waste.
If there is one area where the greatest margin for improvement can be targeted, it is undoubtedly logistics. Specifically, work will focus on three fronts: the transportation of goods, for the setting up and dismantling of the exhibition space and for supplies during the event; the movements of people (staff, volunteers, exhibitors, speakers and visitors); and finally the trips required to sort waste to its collection site. On the first front, it is worth noting that Italian Exhibition Group has already been engaged in a process of optimising and streamlining goods handling for two years.
On all these fronts, the Meeting's organisers aim never to act alone. The active involvement of all those who, in one way or another, play a role in the event is essential — from institutional partners to visitors, including volunteers. The latter will be trained in sustainability culture and will become its ambassadors across a range of areas: they will assist visitors with correct behavioural practices, engage with them and explore their expectations and the issues they care about most.