Convention season is an exciting time for punters and artists alike – but for the latter, it also means making print runs, merch stock-ups and generally ensuring everything is ready and you’re armed to the teeth with everything you need before the date rolls around.

UK printing service YouLovePrint knows that unfortunately, events of this scale often lead to a lot of waste; paper, plastic signage, and – for artists specifically – the boxes of unsold prints that somehow manage to go back home heavier than they arrived.

The responsibility of reducing waste lies with all four parties – the venue, the organisers, the attendees and the artists. Only the latter is something an individual artist has any real control over, so that’s the one we’ll be focussing on in this article.

The Scale Of The Problem

Before we jump into the meat of this article, let’s look at some stats.

isla, the UK events industry’s own sustainability body, measured 789 events through its carbon-tracking platform TRACE over the course of 2025, publishing the findings earlier this year in their report “A Closer Look: Materials”.

Across more than 6,400 logged material entries, 84% of everything used to build out those events was “virgin” material, not reused or recycled stock, and 42% of build materials were used exactly once before being thrown away.

Carpet came out as the single highest-emitting build material, 78% of which is also used only once. isla put a cost on the disposal side too: across the events it measured, single-use materials generated roughly 1,229 tonnes of waste and around £292,000 in disposal costs, with isla’s own framing being that this is “just what’s been measured,” rather than the full picture of an industry that runs far more events than it currently tracks.

It’s true that this data covers British events in a broad sense, mixing corporate conferences and trade shows with public-facing ones. This data isn’t specific to Comic Cons, and there’s yet to be an equivalent breakdown for MCM or for pop-culture cons specifically.

The closest we have to this comes from the US. San Diego Comic-Con’s cleanup crews have reported hauling away 23 tons of trash from a single event, including over 18,600 fliers and posters and close to 5,000 stickers, about six times the seven tons crews handle there in a typical week. That figure is from 2014, so it’s fairly outdated and it only describes one US show, but it’s included here to illustrate what unmanaged paper and signage waste can look like at a large convention. One hopes that things have improved over the past eight years.

What Can Artists Do?

Let’s be clear – venue-level waste is entirely outside any individual artist’s control. Nobody selling prints at a table gets a say in whether the venue re-lays its carpet or the organiser reuses signage next year. Artists can make enquiries about what the venue or organisers plan to do about waste, perhaps as a gentle reminder that they should be thinking about this sort of thing, but there’s not much else that can be done.

What artists do have control over is their own print run, and that’s where the waste problem and the money problem turn out to be the same problem.

Convention-selling guides return to the same failures again and again: artists guessing at print quantities with no sell-through data from previous shows to work from, packing “everything they’ve ever made” instead of a tight, considered selection, and going home with stock that cost real money and didn’t sell.

One frequently cited piece of exhibitor advice puts a rough shape on it: tables carrying 50-plus designs tend to underperform a focused set of 15 to 20 strong pieces. Without a system for tracking what moved last time, most artists end up, in the words of one guide, “packing based on vibes.”

The same source works through a concrete example: an artist who spends $400 on inventory but sells only $300 of it is operating at a loss before table fees, travel or accommodation are even added in. Those figures come from a US convention-selling guide, so treat the ratio as illustrative, rather than accurate. Even so, the underlying mechanism of printing against a “guess” is what sends a box of unsold stock home from artist alley.

This part of the waste management efforts belongs to artists and creators specifically, and it’s where following a strict set of guidelines can really make a difference.

None of the following requires a different way of working, just planning a print run with the same care that goes into the artwork itself.

The Waste Management Checklist

• Track sell-through, not vibes. Note what sold at your last two or three shows before deciding what to print for the next one. It’s the single biggest lever against overstock, and costs nothing but five minutes with a spreadsheet after each show.
• Order print closer to the show, in smaller batches. A pay-on-production model, where nothing’s committed up front for a bulk discount, makes this realistic instead of a false economy.
• Get artwork checked before it goes to press. A free proofing or artwork-check step catches errors that would otherwise mean an entire batch gets reprinted from scratch.
• Use digital proofing before a full run is committed. Catching a mistake on screen costs nothing; catching it in a box of finished prints doesn’t.
• Choose FSC-certified stock and a printer carrying recognised environmental certification (ISO 14001, CarbonNeutral status) if print is unavoidable, so the volume you do need carries a smaller footprint.
• Choose A UK-based manufacturer. This cuts the transport footprint that comes with importing stock from overseas.
• Treat your banners and stand materials as reusable across multiple shows. This may cost a little more upfront to ensure durability, but you won’t be throwing materials away at the end of each convention. This is the same lesson isla’s carpet figures point to at industry scale.
• Plan for unsold stock before the show starts, not once the van’s already full. A discounted “last chance” bin on the final day, copies donated to a school or local library, or recycling what’s left, all beat the bin at the end of the day.

Conclusion

With MCM London right around the corner on 23-25 October 2026, and Birmingham’s date now moved to August, there’s a natural point in an artist’s calendar to start ordering smarter.

The industry-wide waste picture won’t shift because of one artist’s print run, but if all artists pull together to create a more sustainable experience, they can make a serious dent in the amount of waste produced at conventions, which is a win for both the environment and their wallets!