Sustainability

At the Falling Walls Foundation, we run several projects throughout the year, offering a large portfolio of activities centering around a diversity of scientific topics. From the Falling Walls Science Summit to Female Science Talents,  Young Entrepreneurs in Science or the Berlin Science Week, it is our DNA to address current major challenges that we as a society need to tackle. The health of our planet is of utmost importance, and is therefore reflected by a great deal in our various programme activities.

Here are some current examples:

• About 40% of the content in our Falling Walls library includes entries around climate change related topics.
• For Falling Walls Engage the prominent topic of the year is Planetary Health. All Engage Hub discussions which lead into one Plenary Table at the Falling Walls Science Summit will be focussing on this main topic.
• Falling Walls Circle, taking place on 8 November each year, further highlights sustainability topics with several discussion rounds being, i.e. on Sustainable IT and Green Coding, Clean Energy Technologies, Climate Resilience, Equity and Justice
• The Campus of Berlin Science Week 2022 will be carried out under the theme ‘Paradigm Shift. Co-Creating a Sustainable Now‘, and will host over 30 public events and exhibitions on this topic.

In order to engage audiences in innovative and impactful ways, events are an intrinsic part of the Falling Walls Foundation’s identity. We are aware that they consume a lot of energy, create waste, cause travels and further outputs to raise our ecological footprint.

That is why a central goal of our sustainability efforts is to reduce energy consumption, avoid usage where possible, and of course constantly improve these efforts. Here is what we already do, regarding our different events:

Travel & Mobility:

• All event locations & accommodation sites are centrally located within the Berliner Ring and easy to reach by public transport or bike.
• At the Falling Walls Science Summit – a three day event with over 600 attendees and various locations – we furthermore provide pedal scooters for shorter distances and shared bus rides for longer routes.
• In 2020 and 2021, thousands of people followed all our events via livestream; by continuing to offer our events digitally, we reduce the need to travel to our events, and increase the amount of people who can benefit from the content on a large scale.

Energy & Transportation:

• Many of our events are realised by the technical provider Satis&Fy, who is a certified Sustainable Partner with ‘high performance’ by Visit Berlin.

Food & Waste:

• We only offer vegetarian and/or vegan food. We try to opt for fresh local or at least regional and organic produce with a low carbon footprint. At Radialsystem, the location of our Falling Walls Science Summit, we are catered by their partner, Organiced-Kitchen, a certified organic catering company.
• Besides, food waste is a massive problem in food production, too, and actually affects all parts of the supply chain. Being aware of its far-reaching effects, Falling Walls tries to tackle the challenge on various levels: 1. We try to avoid plastic waste wherever possible and ask our caterer to do the same. 2. We encourage our attendees as well as our staff to bring their own water bottle. 3. We try to avoid single-use plastic and opt for porcelain tableware whenever possible.
• We completely refrain from using decorative elements such as cut flowers.
• All service providers and partners are encouraged to recycle or avoid their packaging.

Print & Merch:

• All events have drastically reduced printed items like the programme booklets, and have shifted most of it to online, accessible via QR code.
• We try to produce our merchandised items without seasonal information (year, names, other information that could change) so they can be reused every year. 
• At the Berlin Science Week Campus we have furthermore commissioned Archimedes, our creative agency, to design signposting and further branding material that are modular and will be reusable for the years to come. If participating with organisations that use our branding material like our recyclable cubes, we organise a transportation to get resources back.
• We try to constantly think about sustainable alternatives for marketing. E.g. Berlin Science Week started using eco friendly street stencils in 2021.

All Falling Walls projects share a common office, which is centrally located and easy to reach by public transport, flexibly designed for agile working, and allows for frequent home offices. This way we minimise rented space and all resources linked to it.

We aspire to keep our workplace as a community space, which is open to innovation and and versatile for different needs. We aim to make conscious choices when it comes to office equipment, materials used and suppliers we work with. We are eager to further develop these measurements and integrate them into our internal processes.

• Most of our staff walk, cycle or take public transport to work and there is an onsite bicycle park.
• We try to avoid paper in daily use, e.g. bookkeeping and almost all other documents are completely digital.
• All bottled water in the office has been replaced with a filtration system run from tap water and other office drinks are delivered as part of a bottle deposit system.
• Tupperware containers are provided for staff for lunch to avoid plastic waste from take-away meals.
• We sort our waste in to 3 different categories.
• We try to save additional energy by switching off electronic devices whenever not in use (e.g. printers, monitors and kitchen appliances)
• We follow recommendations regarding air-ventilation (e.g. turn off the heating when opening the windows and using heat efficiently during winter)
• Since this year, we don’t use personalized business cards, but blank cards. This is to reduce the number of business cards thrown away when changing positions or leaving the company.