New industry data suggests materials, not travel, are the part of your footprint you can actually do something about.
Roll out carpet across a hall and you've just installed the highest-emitting material in your entire build. Roll it up again on Monday and, four times out of five, that's the end of its life. It goes in a skip, and you pay for that too. That's one of the findings in A Closer Look, a new report from Isla built on more than 6,400 material entries logged across 789 events in 2025. And carpet is only where the story starts.
First, who's counting
Isla is a UK-based independent non-profit, formed in 2020 by event professionals, dedicated to cutting the carbon footprint of the events industry. In 2022 it launched TRACE, a carbon measurement platform built specifically for events, which organisers, agencies, venues and exhibition organisers use to log energy, travel, materials, catering and waste across live, hybrid and digital events. Its methodology was verified by Avieco, the sustainability consultancy now part of Accenture UK, and it reports in line with the GHG Protocol.
In other words: this isn't a supplier's marketing survey. It's aggregated data from thousands of real events, which is exactly what our industry has been short of.
The category you actually control
Ask an organiser where their emissions come from and the answer arrives before you finish the question: travel. And they're not wrong. In Isla's data, attendee travel accounts for 88% of total event emissions. It's also the part you have the least say over. You don't get to choose where your delegates live.
Which makes the more useful question: what's left? Take audience travel out of the picture, and materials jump to 27% of what remains. Take staff and crew travel out too, and materials make up 31% of everything you can genuinely control. That puts them ahead of freight, ahead of energy, ahead of catering. The biggest single line on your list, and the one that gets the least attention in a sustainability conversation.
Bought new, used once, binned
The uncomfortable part isn't how much material events use. It's what happens on either side of the show.
Of everything logged, 84% was virgin material, roughly 2.7 tonnes of brand-new stuff per event. And a lot of it never gets a second outing: 42% of build materials and 69% of graphics were used exactly once. That's a straight line from factory to skip, with two days of event in the middle.
Isla is upfront about one distortion, and it's worth repeating. Hired stock is under-logged, because it carries near-zero emissions in TRACE and so tends not to get entered. The genuine reuse rate across the industry is probably better than these numbers suggest. But even reading it generously, an enormous amount of new material enters the events system and doesn't come back out.
The bit that shows up on your invoice
Here's where it stops being a sustainability story. Isla logged 1,229 tonnes of material that was used once and thrown away. Applying UK government packaging waste disposal fees, the estimated disposal bill alone comes close to half a million pounds - before you count what it cost to design, manufacture and truck that material to site in the first place.
Waste is the only line in your budget that buys you nothing. You pay to make it, pay to move it, then pay again to get rid of it. In a market where every quote is being squeezed, that's a strange thing to leave unexamined.
Back to the carpet
Globally, and in the UK specifically, carpet is the highest-emitting material in the build category. Only 15% of it was made from recycled material, which sounds like progress until you notice that recycled input doesn't do anything about single-use output.
In fairness, carpet earns its place. It kills the acoustics in halls that would otherwise be unbearable, it matters for accessibility and safety, and it delivers that instant sense of a finished, considered space. Pulling it out entirely isn't the answer, and anyone who says otherwise hasn't stood in a bare exhibition hall at 8am.
The better question is narrower: which surfaces actually need it? Walk your floorplan and mark the areas where carpet is doing a job, versus the areas where it's there because it's always been there. Then ask your supplier what happens to it on Monday morning - and whether a reusable flooring system could do the same job for five years instead of five days.
On the graphics side, the equivalent offender is the standard non-PVC banner, which carries the highest total emissions in its category. Between flooring and banners, you've found most of your problem.
Weight is a decision too
One of the more useful findings in the report has nothing to do with what a material is made of. Wood makes up 50% of the logged weight but only 12% of emissions - the responsible choice, on paper. Except weight moves the problem into the freight column. Isla calculates that shifting the 1,255 tonnes of wood in the dataset just 10 km produces around 1.86 tonnes of CO₂e, and beyond roughly 400 km, transport overtakes the material's own footprint entirely. Plastic runs the other way: 37% of the weight, 66% of the emissions.
Material choice and material volume aren't two separate decisions. They're the same one, and you can't optimise for either in isolation.
The regional numbers are the encouraging bit
Sourcing patterns aren't uniform. Virgin material sits at 73% in the EU against 91% in both the UK and the US. What ends up in the waste stream ranges from 33% in the US to 56% in the UK and 61% in the EU.
But the detail worth flagging: the material logged most frequently in the UK is paper-based board, where globally and in the US it's printed PVC vinyl decal. That's a lower-impact substitute being used at genuine scale, by mainstream suppliers, under real production deadlines. Which quietly settles the "the alternatives don't exist yet" argument.
And a question for venues
Isla ends on an open one, and it's the argument our industry should be having: does the infrastructure for circular materials actually exist?
Furniture, AV and rigging are hired as a matter of course. Nobody buys a truss for one show. Flooring, walls and graphics somehow escaped that logic. Venues are unusually well placed to change that - they already control the space, the waste contracts and often the in-house suppliers. A venue that held reusable flooring inventory, or coordinated it between the organisers passing through, could break the single-use default in a way that no individual organiser can manage alone. And the ones that move first will be selling something their competitors can't.
Three things to change in your next brief
- Specify the sourcing order. Hire or reuse first, recycled content second, virgin as the last resort - written into the brief as a requirement, not a nice-to-have. Suppliers meet the specs you give them.
- Decide the exit before you buy the entrance. If nobody can tell you where a material goes after load-out, you already know: the skip. Late-night breakdown is the worst possible moment to make that call.
- Track kilos, not just carbon. Volume is the number that tells you whether anything is genuinely improving. A lighter show is a cheaper show.
None of this requires a different industry. It requires asking two or three more questions at the point where the order gets placed.
Isla's full report, A Closer Look: Materials, is available to download free - including the complete regional breakdowns, the sourcing and end-of-life flows, and its recommendations for organisers, suppliers and venues. Download the report here: Isla_report_A_Closer_Look_Materials.pdf
Source: Photo: iStockPhoto 157675415
