Case Study — Reuse

The booths that went home again.

The 2026 B Corp Champions Retreat needed a vendor Marketplace for an audience that would notice if the fixtures were landfilled at the end of it. Green Living specified ReFrame. The fixtures were built for eleven shows instead of one, packed into seventeen cartons, and shipped home — which is what makes the carbon numbers below real rather than rhetorical.

ClientGreen Living, for B Lab U.S. & Canada
The needReusable vendor Marketplace fixtures
The build12 podiums, 5 shelving units
Timeline6–8 weeks
The booths that went home again.
A sustainability conference cannot throw its booths away

The mission

A sustainability conference cannot throw its booths away

The B Corp Champions Retreat brings together the companies that have certified themselves on how they treat people and the planet. Its Marketplace — the hall where member brands show what they make — needed fixtures for a room full of people who would notice if those fixtures went into a dumpster on Sunday night.

That is a harder brief than it sounds. Most trade show fixtures are built to survive one event. They are cut, printed, installed, and landfilled on site, because shipping them home costs more than building them again.

The brainstorm

Design for eleven shows, not one

Green Living brought the project to AOSA and specified the ReFrame system, which already answered the structural half of the problem: flat-pack plywood, hand assembly, no tools, printed panels that swap out per vendor.

The decision that actually moved the numbers was made before anything was cut. The fixtures were specified for eleven lifetime uses — this retreat plus ten more events — and the materials were chosen for the lowest honest footprint available: Falcon Board paper honeycomb in place of PVC foam board, PureBond soy-bonded plywood in place of conventional MDF.

The build

Twelve podiums, five shelving units, seventeen cartons

The Marketplace was fitted out with twelve ReFrame podiums and five shelving units, each one slot-together, assembled by hand on the floor without tools, and skinned with printed panels for the vendor using it.

At the end of the show the whole thing packed back down into seventeen cartons and shipped home — the step most builds skip, and the one the entire carbon case rests on.

The result

35% lower this show, and the fixtures came home

Holding materials and quantities identical and changing only reuse versus single-use, this show came in 35.2% below an equivalent single-use build, net of the carrier's purchased offset on the return leg.

The larger number is the one that arrives later: 1,103 kg CO₂e avoided by not rebuilding these fixtures from scratch for each of the next ten events — roughly 2,757 miles of driving, by the EPA's passenger-vehicle factor.

Every figure behind those two sentences, along with the assumptions and the sources they came from, is published below. Nothing here is rounded in AOSA's favour: the gross figure is shown alongside the net one, and the material comparison is given as a range rather than a single flattering number.

“ReFrame displays were a great fit for our conference Marketplace — versatile, easy to customize, ship, assemble, and reuse. They helped us support a variety of vendors while meeting both our budget and sustainability goals.”
Robert Orlovski, Green Living

Planning a show where the booths shouldn't end up in a dumpster?

Tell us what the hall needs and how many times you want to use it. If a used booth would do the job instead, the marketplace is a good place to start.

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The Numbers

Every figure, shown with its source

Holding materials and quantities identical, the only variable in the table below is reuse vs. single-use. Reusable gear has to “pay” a one-time return-freight cost a landfill-bound build skips — so the honest comparison shows both a net figure (crediting the carrier's purchased offset) and the gross figure without it.

1,103 kg CO₂e avoided by not rebuilding these fixtures from scratch for each of the next 10 events
35.2% lower footprint for this show alone vs. an equivalent single-use build (net of the carrier's purchased offset)
≈ 2,757 mi driving-equivalent of the avoided future remanufacturing (EPA passenger-vehicle factor)

This show, in isolation

Baseline (single-use)As built (net)As built (gross)
Total kg CO₂e 284.988184.717266.574
Reduction vs. baseline —100.271 kg (35.2%)18.414 kg (6.5%)

“Net” credits the carrier's purchased offset on the return freight leg; “Gross” does not. Baseline holds materials/quantities identical to the actual build — single-use, landfilled on-site, no return freight.

Where the real payoff shows up: reuse over time

kg CO₂e
Avoided remanufacturing (10 future rebuilds no longer needed) 1,102.980
One-time return-freight cost paid this cycle (gross) 81.856
Net lifecycle advantage of reuse (manufacturing only) 1,021.124

Freight for future events is excluded — ship-from locations for the next 10 shows aren't yet known.

Material choice — a conservative floor, not the full picture

vs. typical single-use alternative
Falcon Board (paper honeycomb) vs. PVC foam board 4–16× lower
Pure Bond plywood (soy-bonded) vs. conventional MDF ≈2.3× lower

Presented as a range, not a single number — the exact spec a competing single-use build would have used is genuinely unknowable. This gap is on top of, not included in, the reuse savings above.

LTL freight factor applied to both outbound and return legs

EPA 2025 GHG Emission Factors Hub (0.186 kg CO₂/short ton-mile, shared/consolidated freight); the carrier publishes no package-level factor, so the same factor is used as a proxy for the return leg.

Return shipment = 17 boxes (12 podium + 5 shelving), 25 lb each

.5" Falcon Board rate derived by scaling the worksheet's .25" rate

Hexacomb .5" thickness (≈1.472 kg CO₂e/sheet)

Podiums and shelving amortize over 11 total lifetime uses

This show plus 10 more planned uses.

Baseline alternative: same materials/quantities, single-use, landfilled on-site, no return freight

Standard practice at most trade shows; proposed and unopposed.

Carrier's "carbon neutral" return leg shown gross, not zeroed

GHG Protocol practice — purchased offsets are disclosed separately, not silently netted against gross emissions, pending the carrier's own underlying shipment-level figure.

B Corp Champions Retreat 2026 Marketplace

B Lab U.S. & Canada, 2026 — view source

GHG Emission Factors Hub

US EPA, 2025 — view source

Greenhouse Gas Emissions from a Typical Passenger Vehicle

US EPA, 2024 — view source

Life Cycle Assessment of Softwood Plywood Production

CORRIM, 2013 — view source

North American Softwood Plywood EPD (A1–A3)

AWC / CWC, 2020 — view source

Carbon Footprint of Corrugated Board

FEFCO / Plan Be Eco, 2022 — view source

North American Medium Density Fiberboard EPD

CORRIM / AWC, 2024 — view source

Carbon Neutral Credentials

UPS, 2026 — view source