Walk past the service yard on the last night of any exhibition and you will see the industry’s dirty secret: skip after skip of timber, board and graphics, built for three days and binned.
Sustainable exhibition stands are our answer to that. Stands designed for impact on the show floor, and designed just as deliberately for what happens after the doors close.
The biggest impact in creating an eco-friendly exhibition stand comes from not throwing the stand away.
Every Mercer stand is engineered on the beMatrix frame system: precision aluminium frames that work as walls, ceilings and floors, get reused show after show, and are recycled with minimal energy at end of life because they avoid coatings like anodising and powder coating.
One kit of frames can become a completely different stand at every show it attends. That is the core of sustainable exhibition stand design: reuse designed in from the first sketch, not recycling bolted on at the end.
There is a lingering assumption that eco-friendly exhibition stands means boring. Ours are anything but. Because the reusable engineering is invisible in the finished build, your stand can carry double-height structures, backlit fabric graphics, LED walls and bold branding while still coming apart into stock components afterwards. Sustainability is in how the stand is made, not how loudly it announces itself.
And you see it before you commit: a free 3D visual comes with every quote. Where materials do have to be produced fresh, chiefly graphics, we print in-house using eco-friendly print methods, which gives us control over what gets produced, and fabric graphics can be reused across multiple shows where the artwork allows.
More organisers now ask exhibitors about the sustainability of their stands, and more visitors notice. Building reusable gives you a genuine story to tell: not offsetting, not vague pledges, but a stand that measurably avoids single-use waste. We are happy to explain the system to your CSR or procurement team, and to support the sustainability questions in exhibitor documentation.
Mostly, whether it exists after the show. A stand built from reusable components avoids the single largest impact of exhibiting: the disposal of one-use structures. Materials, print processes and transport matter too, but reuse is the foundation. That is why every Mercer stand is engineered on a reusable frame system as standard.
Usually the opposite over time. A reusable stand spreads its cost across every show it attends, where a single-use build is paid for once and skipped. First-time costs are comparable to a quality custom build; by the second or third show, the reusable stand is ahead.
Yes. The frame system is invisible in the finished stand, sitting behind seamless graphics and finishes. Double-deck structures, backlit walls and LED screens are all achievable. If nobody told your visitors the stand was reusable, they would not know.
The frames come apart and return to stock for reuse on future builds. Graphics can be stored by you for your next show where the artwork allows, and aluminium components that reach end of life are recycled with minimal energy because the frames avoid coatings that complicate recycling.
Yes. Organisers increasingly include sustainability criteria in exhibitor manuals, and we can provide the details of how your stand is built, reused and recycled to support your responses.
The structure of ours is. The beMatrix aluminium frames avoid coatings that complicate recycling, so at end of life they are recycled with minimal energy; long before that, they are reused across hundreds of builds. Graphics are the harder part, which is why we prioritise fabric formats that can be reused across shows.
A hired, reusable one. Reuse beats recycling, and both beat single-use construction, so a stand built from stock components, used for your show and returned to stock is the lowest-impact way to exhibit that currently exists.
Reuse first: the structure never becomes waste because it never leaves the loop. Beyond that, graphics are reused between shows where artwork allows, print is produced in-house to the quantities actually needed, and nothing is built for a single use.
