Louisville, KY – Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson visited the International BoatBuilders Exposition & Conference (IBEX) here recently to see a demonstration of a new “paperless” trade show system that has the potential to significantly reduce or eliminate the distribution of paper-based marketing materials at trade shows held at the Kentucky Exposition Center (KEC) starting in 2011.

This new system – the Green Box™ solution from Tustin, California-based Viridistor LLC – offers the city and the expo center the first viable way to dramatically reduce the volume of trash generated at trade shows and conferences. The system will be used at future IBEX shows held in Louisville, as well as other events at the KEC, to provide all-electronic distribution of corporate marketing materials in exhibitor booths as well as for handout of presentation materials at conference educational sessions.

Mayor Jerry Abramson & Terry Mullin, CEO of Viridistor “The Viridistor system holds great promise for eliminating tremendous amounts of trash right here in our own backyard,” said Mayor Abramson. “It’s calculated that if every attendee at the IBEX Show had gathered just 15 pounds of literature each – which is probably far less than most people took  away – that would have amounted to more than 40 tons of paper, or the equivalent of almost 1,000 trees that could have been saved.”

“That’s a powerful statement about greenhouse gas reduction and efforts by both the IBEX Show and the City of Louisville to reduce the municipal carbon footprint,” noted Terry Mullin, Viridistor President & CEO.

The use of the Green Box system is the latest in a continuing series of programs to make the City of Louisville green. In 2005 Mayor Abramson signed the Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement, which pledged to reduce the city’s carbon emissions seven percent over 1990 levels by 2012. In 2008 the Board of Trustees of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) awarded honorary membership to the mayor for his work in government and environmental activism. And in 2010 he was honored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as an “Energy Star Partner of the Year” for the city’s innovative “Kilowatt Crackdown” program.

The paperless service from Viridistor enables organizations to “go green without going broke” by bringing exhibitor information management into the 21st century, and it provides benefits for all event participants, according to Mullin.

“Trade show and conference owners can offer a versatile and practical new service to their corporate exhibit customers that helps them to eliminate one of the top five costs of participating at events – the printing, shipping, inventorying and handling of promotional literature for events,” Mullin noted. “In addition, facilities such as the Kentucky Exposition Center can reduce their costs by eliminating one of the biggest sources of post-event waste – and trade shows are second only to the construction industry in the volume of waste produced. The best part is, event attendees no longer have to lug around hundreds of pounds of paper at an event.”

At most show and conference events, exhibitors must estimate how many sets of marketing literature they will need to produce for distribution to attendees. At the IBEX Show, many companies  handed out materials that were valued at $15 or more per set, and when they ran out, they had no additional materials to distribute. With the Green Box solution, that same literature “set” would have cost less than one dollar per person to distribute – and it could have included multimedia and audio/video files as well as brochures and documents – plus, no exhibitor would have run out of electronic copies.

Here’s how the system works. When show attendees register on-site, along with their normal show ID badges they will receive a free high capacity USB device. As they tour the show and discover products and services for which they want more information, the USB drive is simply inserted into a  port on the Green Box distribution devices in exhibitor booths to instantly download that exhibitor’s materials.

Attendee USB-devices are tailored to each specific show and will feature an electronic show guide and floor maps so that attendees can search exhibitor offerings by company name, by product category and by booth location. Using the Viridistor software applications that are included on each USB, people can better plan what they want to see and with whom they want to meet. They can review and share all of their collected literature more easily following the show simply by inserting it in their Mac or PC computer. Finally, when they’re done with that content, they can erase the USB and have a high capacity memory stick for personal use.