My second day at Greenbuild started with a terrible education session. It was entitled Thinking Big: Green Buildings on Every Street and co-presented by Eric Corey Freed and Lucia Athens. I’ve seen Eric lecture at other events and usually have a good opinion of his shows, but this one was really off target. His half of the talk covered three issues - suburbia, Detroit, and Dallas. But in none of these topics did he mention green buildings. The section on suburbia was a random smattering of statistics and funny images, the section on Detroit was part history lesson and part discussion on urban farms, and the section on Dallas was a not so subtle pitch for his non profit consulting organization. Plus, the graphics on his slides made it seem like he was phoning it in. He clearly pulled together slides from previous shows and you could still see traces of them. Lucia Athens’ contribution was a full on pitch for her book. Overall, a huge disappointment.
Luckily, we shifted gears and did a number of good interviews with Alumillenium (a recycled aluminum and brass tile maker), Coverings ETC (maker of a tile products composed of various recycled materials - glass, ceramic, aluminum, plastic), Kirei (a wood substitute panel maker - sorghum, wheat, coconut, bamboo, and hemp), Squawk Mountain Stone (a producer of solid surfaces made from one hundred percent recycled paper), and Enviroglas (a maker of solid surfaces with recycled glass). I’ll go into more detail on each later today.
One interesting event we attended at lunch time was a press conference held by American Clay - the clay based wall covering manufacturer. After a year long series of tests, they’ve uncovered that their product helps indoor spaces maintain temperature stability. Compared to regular paint, American Clay keeps a space cooler in warm weather and warmer in cool weather. The difference between clay and paint varies through the year, but is as much as eleven percent more efficient. They don’t have a complete understanding of why this happens. They’ll be conducting additional testing for another year hoping to uncover more data. It’s an interesting phenomenon and one we’ll be watching.
I attended another terrible educational session in the afternoon. It was an experiment for the presenters that did not work. On stage was a moderator and on screen were four speakers linked through a web cast. If the technology problems they faced were the only issue, I think I could have forgiven them for making the effort. One of the speakers had a bad connection and was present for fifteen minutes tops. The sound for two other speakers cut in and out so that I couldn’t understand a thing they said. But truly sad was the material they presented. It was supposed to be about how social media advances the conversation on sustainable design. But the dialogue never went deeper than Facebook is neat, Twitter is cool, and LinkedIn is for business people to link up. Really? Is that all? I kept waiting for them to dive in, but kept the entire thing very top line. All four participants were twenty something recently graduated architecture students (and one who dropped out of school to start a blog) with limited green design experience. It was hard to take anything they said seriously. And I know how old that makes me sound.
Peter Gleik, one of the world’s experts on water, gave a great talk about global water issues and their connection to energy. It was one of the highlights of the day. I also attended the opening ceremony with Al Gore and Sheryl Crow, but I’ll cover that in a follow up post. For now I’m off to start day three.
Written by Kevin O’Donnell, fundamentalist at thread collaborative. To read more, please visit our web site.
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