In our industry, questions about a destination’s eco attributes are becoming more and more important during site visits. “Are those LED lights?” “Do you serve organic food?” “Can planners publish registration materials locally?” These are all important questions and all questions I heard planners ask on a recent “Sustainable Meetings FAM” trip to Virginia Beach, Va. The staff from the Virginia Beach CVB made it a goal to promote the area’s efforts to focus on eco-friendly practices, especially when it comes to meetings and conferences.

It makes sense for Virginia Beach to focus on its green attributes because it sure has a lot of them. The Virginia Beach Convention Center is the first convention center in the country to earn LEED Gold Certification. A number of hospitality businesses in the city  have joined the “Virginia Green” program that sets standards for sustainability for businesses. Restaurants use biodegradable plates and cups. Hotels have recycling bins in guestrooms. The convention center has a vegetable and herb garden that the chef uses when preparing meals.

Sometimes it seems like going green can be difficult. It takes a lot of effort and money to update a house or business with Energy Star windows and appliances. It’s easier to print badges for a conference rather than invest in reusable ones that have to be collected at the end of an event. Exhibitors often ignore requests to bring more eco-friendly promotional materials. Trying to save energy sometimes costs extra time and money.

What I learned at Virginia Beach, though, is that it’s not necessarily about changing linens lightbulbs. It’s about changing habits and mindsets. It’s unrealistic to think that you can change the habits of your staff and your attendees overnight, but instituting small eco-friendly practices and sticking to them will eventually affect positive change. I learned this during my trip to Virginia Beach when I was taking a tour of the convention center with its general manager, Courtney Dyer. He was quick to point out the center’s climate-control heating and cooling system, energy-efficient lighting, eco-friendly cleaning supplies and enormous recycling bins near the rear loading docks. But it was a comment he made almost in passing that I thought summed up the real driver of the entire green movement.

Dyer arrived to his staff offices at the center one morning to find that all the trashcans underneath employee desks had been replaced with recycling bins. If a person had any trash, he or she had to get up and walk to a trashcan in the middle of the office. “At first it made me mad,” said Dyer, until he realized almost all the waste he produces every day can be recycled. He might have to get up to throw away a PowerBar wrapper, but almost everything goes into the recycling bin. “It starts small,” he said, as he stood on the loading dock of a convention center that’s been awarded a number of sustainability honors. But I realized that without people who are committed to putting eco-friendly ideas into practice, a green building is just a building. It’s the people who work there that truly make it an eco-friendly destination. Going green begins with a few small steps, and sometimes they’re steps to a trash can 30 feet from your desk.