Two booths for the same client in the same week, built to the same specification. The smaller one, shipped to Spain, measured 1,488kg CO2e. The larger one, built in London, measured 377kg. Almost none of the difference is materials.
Ecommpay · Merchant Risk Council; Retail Technology Show · Barcelona; London, Spain; UK · 2024 · Finance and professional services · Design; Production; Project Management
Ecommpay exhibits across Europe and wanted a booth system rather than a series of one-off builds: something hired and reusable, specified to a real environmental standard, and capable of being set up in Barcelona on a Monday and London on a Wednesday. What they got alongside it was a measurement of both, which turned out to be the more useful deliverable.
Both booths sit on an Aluvision modular aluminium frame, hired rather than built, and designed to be stored and reused rather than scrapped. Wall graphics are tensioned zero-PVC fabric. Counters and stepped shelving are Xanita, a 100% recyclable and non-toxic cardboard board, and FSC certified timber, finished in Lick paint, a B Corp product, low VOC and carbon neutral certified by ClimatePartner. All furniture was rented for reuse.
Nothing was thrown away at the end of either show. Every fabric graphic was turned into a furniture bag, the structure went back into store, and 100% of materials were separable at end of life. The London booth was produced and built in London, with electric vehicles used for UK transport.
Two shows, two countries, forty-eight hours apart, on one kit system and one crew. The Barcelona booth had to strike, travel and be replaced on a London floor inside two days, which removes every option that depends on a bespoke element being made once and thrown away. A hired modular frame is the only structure that survives that schedule, and it is also, as it turns out, the low-carbon one.
The material substitutions had their own friction. A cardboard board and a zero-PVC fabric behave differently in print, carry longer lead times and take handling less forgivingly than the vinyl they replace, on a booth that had to cross a border twice and come home intact.
Barcelona, 18 square metres: 1,488kg CO2e. London, 36 square metres: 377kg. Half the footprint, four times the carbon. Per square metre the gap is wider still, 83kg against 10kg.
The two numbers are not perfectly comparable and it matters how. The Barcelona scope includes hotel nights for the production crew and the London scope does not, so part of the gap is boundary rather than reality. But the materials on both booths are the same materials, hired from the same system and specified to the same standard, which means the materials cannot explain a fourfold difference. What explains it is movement: freight across a border, crew travel, and the accommodation that goes with a build away from home.
That is the finding worth taking from this page. On a modular booth built to a good specification, the carbon is mostly not in the booth. It is in how far the booth and the people travelled to meet each other. Which is why the useful question at the start of an exhibition programme is not "what is it made of" but "where is it made, and who has to fly".
Barcelona scope covers embodied carbon of newly created materials, all logistics movements, hotel nights of production crew and production facility energy use. London scope covers the same excluding crew hotel nights. Both indicative, calculated in house, not independently audited.
Aluvision modular aluminium, hired. Zero-PVC tensioned fabric wall graphics. Xanita recyclable cardboard board. FSC certified timber. Lick paint, B Corp, low VOC, carbon neutral certified by ClimatePartner. Rented furniture.