Velo-city in Vienna: the biggest, greenest cycling conference ever.

Velo-city 2013 Vienna has been awarded an prestigious annual Austrian Event award as a green and sustainable event. The organizers did all they could to make the world's biggest cycling conference as green as possible -  and this year, Velo-city Global 2014 in Adelaide will try to do the same.

The prize, awarded by Austrian agency eventwerkstatt.at, honours Austria's best events every year in 12 categories. The "Green Award" is a special category reserved for the greenest and most sustainable event of the year. And this year it went to Velo-city 2013, which took place in Vienna from June 11 - 14 last year.

Velo-city Vienna won the award because cycling is a sustainable means of mobility, but that's not all. Conference participants were also using bikes to travel between the different conference venues.The jury says this really brought the green aspect of the conference closer to the delegates.

Praticing what you preach

But Velo-city Vienna's green event strategy included many more aspects, such as carbon offsetting for journeys to the conference; accomodation in places that are certified with an eco-label; energy consumption of the conference venues; reducing printed material and give-aways, as well as catering using regional seasonal and fair trade products.

For ECF and its partners - the city of Vienna and agencies stadt wien marketing, PlanSinn, Rosinak & Partner & Event Company - it was not an easy task to achieve this, because Velo-city 2013 was the biggest edition of Velo-city ever. More than 1.400 delegates  from all over the world came to Vienna and gave over 330 presentations. To make such a large event eco-friendly and sustainable is quite an achievement. 

Doing it again in Adelaide

An achievement that Velo-city 2014 - this time as a global edition in Adelaide - is determined to repeat. Not by chance, the Adelaide organizers have chosen the Adelaide Convention Center as their conference venue. The Convention Center has a Silver certification from EarthCheck, a renowned environmental benchmarking company,  recycles almost all its waste, is trying hard to save as much water as possible, and implements many more eco-friendly policies.

Not to mention that delegates will be cycling around Adelaide a lot during the conference. They definitely got the bug in Vienna.