I wrote earlier today about grumbling at a Greenbuild session on life-cycle assessment, and I assigned the blame to bad news delivered by Stanley Rhodes of Scientific Certification Systems.
Based on some of the audience Q&A I think that much of the audience left grumbling after Thursday's session, "Demystifying Sustainability: A Life-Cycle Perspective," convened by the energetic Meredith Elbaum of Sasaki, with Stanley Rhodes of Scientific Certification Systems speaking along with Nancy Harrod of Sasaki and Melissa Vernon of InterfaceFlor.
Though Greenbuild '07 wraps up soon (and checkout time at my hotel is at noon), I've still got a number of things to report. There will be additional Greenbuild-related posts in the coming days about products, happenings, and a probably a slight meander about social and professional hierarchies. It will be nice to have a little more time to think—a little less immediacy, a little more research, a little more sleep, a little less frenzy—but I've had a blast this week.
To follow up on another reader comment, apparent fetishist Matthew suggested that "a fun report might be documenting the types of shoes people are wearing"—so I spent a little time shoe-gazing last night at the Leadership Awards celebration in the Merchandise Mart.
I hadn't had the opportunity to look in on it since Monday, but I see now that the good folks from GreenSource started posting to their Greenbuild blog a couple days ago. Content-rich!, and a decidedly more journalistic voice than the mumbles and barks I've been spouting here.
Here's how self-absorbed I can get: I keep going back to the Greenbuild bookstore to see how many copies of Green Building Products are displayed. (I'm a co-editor with Alex Wilson.) It's not like I get royalties or anything; any of that funnels back into the company. It's just pure vanity, I guess.
The prospect of getting into today's plenary by Paul Hawken isn't looking good for me. The lines are about as long as they were for Clinton yesterday, probably because all the people who were standing in the registration line then are available now to stand in this one.
UTC Power, (the fuel cell folks), brought a hydrogen bus to Greenbuild and are giving people rides around the block.
Alex Wilson is about to begin the session presenting the Top-10 products added to GreenSpec and/or reviewed in Environmental Building News over the past year... and because I can, vested by the power of the internet, these are them, just for you, even before the standing-room-only crowd of a couple hundred here in the room gets to see them.
Last night we and the GreenSource folks had an intimate, half-crazed private party for 350 invited green builders at the Funky Buddha—a curious and amazing place of several connected rooms filled with murals, sculpture, candles, conversation niches, and atmosphere. Drinks and laughter were the order of the evening. It turns out that I'm not as young as I used to be.
Nadav, along with John Boeker of 7Group and Victor Canseco of Sandpebble Builders, is a panelist for a session at Greenbuild '07 convened by Larry Strain of Siegel & Strain Architects that's going on right now—"Green Guideline Specifications: Taking it Public, Making it Real." Here's how it looks.
Tuesday afternoon the Materials & Resources Technical Advisory Group (MR-TAG) for LEED hosted a public session for stakeholder input into the ongoing process of reevaluating LEED's certified wood and biobased products credits (see EBN Vol 15, No. 6). The MR-TAG, which I chair, had commissioned a team from Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Sylvatica to provide background research and tools to support the decision-making process.
Well, I'm in—standing at the back of an auditorium that seats 6,000... at an event that does seem to me now like it will exceed 20,000 attendees. The registration lines this morning were astonishing, a mythical beast with multiple tails snaking up and down the expansive corridors of this sprawling structure. I tried to take pictures, but it was one of those scenes that a lens just can't convey.
