It’s amazing how exhausting a large conference can be. After just two days I’m spent, but day three was well worth forcing myself to start early again. I began with a morning educational session entitled When the Rubber Hits the Road. A moderator plus representatives from Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, and Chipotle discussed the difficulties and benefits chain food service retailers face in their attempt to move toward sustainable design. All three have have LEED certified stores (though DD’s certification is still pending) and/or were involved with the LEED for retail pilot program. These speakers had deep experience and offered useful information about interesting issues.
In the afternoon I attended an educational session entitled GreenFormat in Practice. CSI is one of the leading organizations trying to bring some order to the chaos that exists with green material claims, evaluation criterion, and certification programs. It’s really difficult for designers to make informed decisions. We’ve been covering this issue in recent posts attempting to lay out our structure for sustainable material organization and vetting process. CSI has developed a program called GreenFormat that is a kind of plug in to their MasterFormat specification system. GreenFormat is a free to use on-line searchable database of building materials. They’ve done a good job of complete transparency in their evaluation process. I’ll be checking into the service and posting a review later. One interesting note is that GreenFormat is available as a free iPhone ap. I downloaded it and will be testing next week. Check it out and let me know what you think.
The exhibit floor closed yesterday. There’s simply no way to cover the entire floor in detail plus aggressively attend educational sessions. Each year the floor gets bigger and more difficult to cover. I know I didn’t see everything I should have. Going into this year’s conference I decided to focus attention exclusively on materials. There were more alternative energy products - solar PV options, wind turbines, geothermal, and others - but no time to visit. And there are dozens of furniture manufacturers, lighting makers, systems management companies, consulting services, educational and training programs, publishing companies, plumbing component makers, green roofs, and so much more. As I say, too many to cover.
We continued interviewing some of our favorite material manufacturers. Today we spent time with Richlite (maker of solid surfacing of 100 percent recycled paper), IceStone (maker of terrazzo solid surfacing with recycled glass aggregate), and PaperStone (maker of solid surfacing of one hundred percent recycled paper). We also visited with Steelcase and InterfaceFLOR to get their help with the class I’m developing for the UCLA-Extension Certificate in Global Sustainability program. I’m planning an interesting project where students will disassemble and trace all the materials of an everyday product. I’m hoping Steelcase will allow me to disassemble one of their Think chairs in class. I’ll keep you posted on class progress. It’ll take us a little time to go through our interview recordings, but we’ll be posting individual posts on each company interviewed.
I’ve been a fan of the Pharos Project for several years and very anxious for them to finally relaunch the site and giving designers access to their sustainable materials evaluation database. Originally they were a free service non profit, but they’ve been working for the past two years transitioning the company to a for profit subscription model. They’re running a two day free trial. I’m going look into it early next week and will post a review. A new green building social network was launched this year called GreenKonnect. It’s intended to be an on-line platform to connect designers, projects, and material manufacturers. It seems like a potentially valuable service. I’ll review them next week and post about it.
Written by Kevin O’Donnell, fundamentalist at thread collaborative. To read more, please visit our web site.
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