Agency to tackle massive waste in events industry
Katerina Grant, the founder of brand experience agency The World Of, has launched a second agency designed to reduce the waste and environmental impact of the events and experiential industry.
Called Unend, the new agency hopes to shift the industry towards a more sustainable, circular practice.
Headquartered in Sydney, Unend will work alongside brands, agencies, organisers, and suppliers to try and achieve a hefty goal — “eliminate waste, reduce emissions, and build a socially equitable world”.
It hopes to make the global experience industry 18% circular by 2030, and 100% circular by 2050. Circular in this context means re-using materials, reducing waste, and recycling where true circularity is not possible.
Unend
Australia’s events industry is worth over $36 billion, according to Unend’s media release sent on Wednesday. Grant hopes to help the industry rethink how live experiences should be designed, delivered, and most importantly, dismantled.
To reach its goal, the agency will work across the entire lifecycle of an event — from planning to post-production — offering the various touchpoints different levels of support. It will also offer free resources to industry professionals.
Grant founded brand experience agency The World Of in 2012, and over the past two decades, has helped produce global events for clients including Hermès, Louis Vuitton, NBC, the International Olympic Committee, and Apple. She said she started to see a “disconnect” between the growing importance of sustainability and the waste-heavy reality of the events world.
“So many teams want to do better but don’t know where to start. UNEND exists to fill that gap – with practical frameworks, localised knowledge, and the flexibility to work at any scale,” she said in the release.
Grant has hired Kirby Clark, a skilled experiential lead and designer as Unend’s new circular strategist. She has developed the agency’s “five-step methodology”, designed to avoid greenwashing.
(L-R): Katerina Grant, Kirby Clark
Unend reports on the impact of its projects once they have finished. These will be measured against Life Cycle Analysis, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and new international circularity frameworks.
On an example listed on its website — an in-store activation with a 120-person VIP dinner and six window displays — Unend claims to have saved almost 14 tons of resources from landfill, and saved 28 tons of CO2 emissions.
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Lauren McNamara is the associate editor at Mumbrella, covering the agency beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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