Attendees downloaded and printed these PDF documents on scratch paper and brought them to the 2009 Annual Conference!

Hotel and Outside Event Information
Houston Rail Schedule
Downtown Houston Restaurants
Session Descriptions
Speaker Biographies

The average meeting produces 20 pounds of waste per person, per day according to the Green Meetings Industry Council. Dedicated to sustainability for meetings and events, the Council has a challenge for the industry: Divert, recycle, or compost a million tons of trash between Earth Day (April 22), and the end of 2009. The Dance/USA Conference has accepted this challenge!

Our 2009 Annual Conference in Houston went "Green.” Our “green registration” commited to publishing most pre-conference materials electronically, and facilitates paperless online registration! Follow us on Twitter, www.twitter.com/connectdanceusa, recently launched to help keep you informed of the latest developments – without using a single piece of paper! Only the most essential information was printed for distribution on-site.

The traditional pre-conference package would actually include several meetings worth of candy-colored booklets, schedules, pamphlets and flyers that look beautiful… until they end up in a land-fill, clogging our rivers and streams, and depleting our forests! Fortunately, the proliferation of new technologies enables us to communicate effectively with you, while being good stewards of our planet. We’ve also committed to minimizing the amount of paper items at the conference, making them downloadable from our website.

A typical five-day conference for 2,500 attendees will use 90,000 cans or bottles, 75,000 cups and 87,500 napkins (Meeting Strategies Worldwide, 2003). This is a tremendous impact on our environment. We therefore encouraged attendees to be ‘good stewards’ while you’re attending the Dance/USA conference and take personal measures to conserve. For example:

• Take notes on your PDA.
• Print out essential information on scrap-paper.
• At the hotel, conserve on towels, linen and water usage.

For more information about “Green Meetings,” click here!