Emota and AstraZeneca win Best Sustainable Build at the C&IT Impact Awards

Creating a booth that practised what it preached has earned Emota and AstraZeneca the Best Sustainable Build award at the C&IT Impact Awards.

The C&IT Impact Awards celebrate organisations and agencies that are using events as a force for positive change, recognising excellence across sustainability, social impact and innovation. Winning Best Sustainable Build is a fantastic recognition of what can be achieved when sustainability is embedded into every stage of the creative process, from the earliest design decisions through to build, delivery and post-event legacy.

The winning project was built around a simple but ambitious challenge: how do you create a flagship congress presence that demonstrates a commitment to sustainable healthcare not only through messaging, but through every aspect of its design, build and operation?

Working alongside AstraZeneca, we set out to create exactly that.

As a global leader in respiratory care, AstraZeneca wanted its presence at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Congress to visibly demonstrate its commitment to sustainability. The result was a sustainable exhibition booth where sustainability became both the message and the method – connecting human health and environmental responsibility through immersive storytelling, innovative design and measurable action.

The booth brought together commercial and medical content with a dedicated sustainability journey, giving visitors the opportunity to explore AstraZeneca’s ambitions for sustainable healthcare and respiratory care. Interactive features including a large-scale paper diorama, a kinetic materials wheel and a striking living lung installation helped bring those stories to life, creating an engaging experience that encouraged exploration and conversation.

Behind the scenes, every element of the build was designed with circularity and environmental impact in mind. Recyclable FSC-certified paperboard was used extensively throughout the structure, furniture and signage, supported by reusable flooring systems, locally sourced planting and carefully considered logistics designed to minimise transport emissions and waste.

Importantly, the project demonstrated that ambitious sustainability goals do not need to come at the expense of creativity, quality or audience engagement. It shows how sustainable event design and impactful brand experiences can work together to deliver measurable results.

Measured against a traditional exhibition build, the project achieved:

• 82% less production waste
• 56% lower production and waste-related carbon emissions
• Approximately 3,000 fewer road miles travelled
• Freight reductions equivalent to around one full truckload
• 99% of materials reused, repurposed or recycled following the event

The booth also delivered strong engagement outcomes, attracting almost 8,000 visitors and generating more than 5,100 digital interactions throughout the congress.

This recognition reflects the collaborative effort between AstraZeneca, Emota and our wider supplier network, whose willingness to innovate and challenge established approaches helped make the project possible. Together, we developed a scalable model for sustainable exhibition design that demonstrates how environmental ambition, creative excellence and audience engagement can work hand in hand.

As sustainability expectations continue to evolve across the events industry, we’re delighted to see this work recognised by C&IT and excited to continue building on the learnings from the project across future programmes.

Want to see how we did it? Read our full sustainable exhibition design case study to discover how the award-winning ERS booth was created.