Pie Factory measured the footprint of Bloomberg's two-day BNEF Summit in 2023. The total came to 1,045.65 tonnes CO2e. Attendee and staff travel accounted for 97.52% of it. Long haul flights alone were 93.07%.
Bloomberg · InterContinental London Park Lane · London, UK · 2023 · Finance and professional services · Consultancy
Bloomberg ran the BNEF Summit over two days at the InterContinental London Park Lane in 2023, and wanted to know the size and shape of the event's carbon footprint and where the largest reductions were available. Pie Factory was engaged to review the event, not to produce it. The scope covered attendee and staff travel, accommodation, catering, supplier activity and the embodied carbon of the set build. The brief was to quantify each category from the client's own records, state the assumptions openly, and identify which decisions actually move the total.
Pie Factory built the footprint from the summit's attendance sheet, mapping each delegate and member of staff to an origin and a journey type, then running those journeys through an online carbon calculator and checking the outputs against the UK government GHG reporting conversion factors 2023. Catering was calculated separately through myemissions.green, menu item by menu item, for both days. Five emitting categories were quantified: attendee and staff travel, accommodation, catering, and the activity of two named suppliers. The set build was assessed for embodied carbon in its materials. Supplier credentials were recorded alongside the numbers: Stagestruck holds ISO 14001, ISO 20121 and EcoVadis Silver. Every assumption was declared rather than buried. All travel from outside Europe was assumed business class long haul. All non-London attendees were assumed to take two hotel nights. Virtual attendance was assumed at 4kg per head. Venue HVAC and electricity were excluded. No waste data was tracked at the event, so waste is absent from the total rather than estimated at zero. Catering was also compared year on year against the 2021 summit.
The boundary, and being straight about it. The summit's footprint is dominated by journeys Bloomberg does not control directly and cannot fully verify, so the travel figure rests on an attendance sheet plus a class and route assumption for every delegate from outside Europe. Venue energy sits with the hotel and was excluded. Waste was never tracked, so it is missing rather than zero. Each of those choices moves the total, and none can be closed without data the event did not collect. Naming them is the only defensible position.
Total, all five quantified categories, two days: 1,045.65 tonnes CO2e. Attendee and staff travel 1,019,697kg (97.52%), of which long haul alone 949,080kg (93.07%). Accommodation 9,706kg (0.93%). Stagestruck 8,499.63kg (0.81%). Catering 7,676.73kg (0.73%). Market Partner 68.25kg (0.01%). Embodied carbon of set build materials 2.79 tonnes. Catering intensity, typical daily menu: 5.17kg CO2e in 2023, down from 11.62kg in 2021. Day 1 menu 89% vegetarian or vegan, Day 2 78%. These are the client's event emissions, quantified by Pie Factory. They are not Pie Factory's own footprint and not a production achievement. Indicative, calculated in house, not independently audited.