Pie Factory designed and delivered Banking Circle's 12m by 9m booth at Money20/20 in Amsterdam in June 2023, built in agricultural waste board, FSC plywood and 100% recycled acrylic. No carbon footprint was published.
Banking Circle · Money20/20 · Amsterdam, Netherlands · 2023 · Finance and professional services · Design; Production; Project Management
Money20/20 is the main European meeting of the payments industry, and Banking Circle sells payments infrastructure to other financial institutions. The audience is other companies' product and treasury teams, so the booth has to hold technical conversations rather than hand out leaflets. At 108 square metres this is a large floor plate in a hall full of them, so the design question was presence at scale without a build that ends in a skip in the Netherlands.
The primary board material is Eco-Board, a panel made from agricultural waste: straw, reeds, wheat, rice, corn, cotton stalks and soybeans. These are crop residues, material that exists whether or not anyone builds a booth out of it. Structural elements are FSC plywood. The floor is Tarkett linoleum, made from natural materials on Cradle to Cradle principles and covered by Tarkett's ReStart take-back scheme, so the flooring has a defined route off site at breakdown rather than an assumption. Transparent and lit elements are Greencast acrylic, 100% recycled and 100% recyclable after use. That second half is what matters on a one-show build, because recycled content with no end of life route only moves the problem down the line. Soft elements are Repreve 100% recycled polyester and pure cotton. Production was delivered with Reflekt Group, which put fabrication close to Amsterdam rather than shipping a British-built booth across the Channel.
An overseas show splits into what travels and what is made locally, and that split decides the freight bill, the build window and the footprint at once. Working with Reflekt Group put fabrication near Amsterdam, which took the structure off a cross-Channel freight route. The remaining difficulty on a build this size is specifying unfamiliar board materials to hold a show's worth of handling. Eco-Board and linoleum behave differently from standard MDF and vinyl, so fixing details and edge treatments have to be drawn for the material rather than adapted on site.
No carbon footprint was published for this project. The report contains no total and no figure from which one could be built, and none is inferred. The reported scope is also narrower than usual: logistical movement of people only. It does not cover materials, freight of materials, or electricity for event tech, which means even a figure calculated retrospectively would not be comparable with figures from projects measured on a fuller scope. What the page stands on is the material specification, which is documented: the board, the flooring take-back route, the recycled and recyclable acrylic, and local production near the show city.
Eco-Board from agricultural waste. FSC plywood. Tarkett linoleum with ReStart take-back. Greencast acrylic, 100% recycled and recyclable. Repreve 100% recycled polyester. Pure cotton.