Seattle Green Festival (March 28th, 2009 - Ecofactory) - Ecofactory got a chance to meet with Derek Van Dyke of Trio Green Benefits to learn more about his involvements in creating educational opportunities. Through his company's effort to create eco-friendly fund raisers for schools and groups, Derek has transformed an eco-friendly printing company into a powerful tool to spread an Earth friendly message to children and young adults.
Green Festival Denver (May 3rd, 2009 - Ecofactory) - Laurie Hessemer of New Era Paint brought us up to speed with the exciting new developments in the eco-friendly paint industry and her efforts to bring this health-promoting technology to homes across the nation. Hessemer got her start in Scottsdale, Arizona before coming to Denver to build a retail showroom of her eco-friendly paint discoveries. Through her travels, Laurie discovered paints that have a Zero-VOC rating and are certified non-toxic.
During this morning's Fair Trade Coffee Break we talked about the various prospective attendees we hope to see at the Green Cities™ Florida convention which is coming to Orlando's Orange County Convention Center this May 20 thru 21, 2009. We started the discussion by announcing some of the people we met the previous day at the May 14th Tweetup at the Dandelion Communitea Café. The Green Cities™ Florida Tweetup was the second such event designed to inform people about Green Cities™ Florida event coming the following week.
Jaime Correa spoke at Green Cities™ Florida about self-sufficient urbanism, and I had the chance to interview him after the talk. In this interview, we discussed a few questions I had about what he had to say in his presentation.
This weeks Fair Trade Coffee Break begins with a shameless request for a fair trade coffee company to provide the ecofactory team with a bag of coffee to test and talk about in next week's Fair Trade Coffee Break podcast sesssion.
The team then breaks into a discussion about the Green Cities™ Florida event that took place in Orlando the previous week. Topics of discussion included:
Tilvee: Eco Ethical Skincare offers all natural cosmetic solutions for the eco friendly consumer. Tilvee prides itself on its product purity. Kristie McNamara, founder of Tilvee, was happy to tell us that her products are created without synthetic fragrances, chemicals, sulfates, or petrochemicals.
In this podcast, EcoFactory staff member Sandra Welte interviews Jessica Lehti of Swift Wind Turbines, from Cascade Energy. Designed in Scotland, these wind turbines are an effective way to offset your energy bills, as they can provide 20-30 percent of the power needed in the average American home.
Jessica talks in this podcast about what's special about Swift Wind Turbines (among other things, they have a diffuser ring that keeps them quiet), what they look like when installed, and how you can get one for your home.
In this podcast, Aimee Heilbrunn of Ecoscene talks to EcoFactory staff reporter Rima LeBlanc about her company. Ecoscene is made up of a group of testers who try out eco-friendly products and evaluate them to determine how useful and effective they are. The basic idea behind the company is that consumers should know which products truly deliver what they claim to be green. Evaluations are posted on Ecoscene's website.
This weeks Fair Trade Coffee Break covers a wide variety of topics, from international news, to green projects in our back yard. This is our first ever fair trade coffee break that actually features fair trade coffee. While we're drinking a blend from the Allegro Coffee Company this week, we're open to suggestions of your personal favorites.
On this week's fair trade coffee break, we don't talk about Michael Jackson.
We do talk about the climate bill being postponed in the Senate, the practicality of owning a hybrid, and the controversial Gray Wolf hunt. We touch on the differences between the seal hunts of Namibia and Canada, and speculate on why the Cape Fur Seals receive less attention.
As the managing principle of a strategic management firm, Coyne and his team take a holistic approach to improve his clients’ market share. Coyne’s business methodology is an unapologetically profit driven sustainable business model addressing environmental and social stewardship which, he says leads to better profits for his clients. Coyne notes that by not considering the larger environmental issues, as a business, core strategies suffer.
For the last 13 years, David Eisenberg’s focus has been on applying sustainable context to building regulations. As the director of DCAT, his organization’s mission is to preserve the long term health of the planet and communities. In his Green Building Focus session entitled “Not Your Father’s Building Codes,” Eisenberg will discuss the unincorporated set of regulatory structures and codes to meet our larger needs. Listen as he discusses what he feels is contextually missing from the building regulatory realm.
In this interview Douglas Pierson and Christopher Mercier, Partners and Design Principals of Form Environment Research (fer) Studio discuss their recent rehabilitation and greening of a 100-year-old building in Louisville, Kentucky. Their session at Green Building Focus will use this project as a case study for the incorporation of environment into building design. Listen as Pierson and Mercier discuss their experience modernizing this historical structure, which is awaiting LEED platinum certification.
As Executive Director of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) of Atlanta, Jeff DuFresne’s membership organization serves as an educational think tank focusing on global land use and sustainability. In his session at Green Building Focus entitled “The City in 2050: The Strategic Role of Green,” DuFresne will address the future of the collective “city”. According to DuFresne, ULI has been tracking where we’re headed as a nation and planet.
Dagmar Epsten is the founder and president of the Epsten Group, a design and consulting firm for high performance buildings. In her session at Green Building Focus, she will address envelope building incentives through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). ARRA will make billions of dollars available for commercial and residential building envelope improvements. Over 75 percent of federal building space and more than one million homes may be modernized under this legislation.
As the Chief Operating Officer for the International Code Council, Dominic Sims is responsible for the long term strategic planning for the membership organization whose focus is building safety. During his session at Green Building Focus, Sims will be discussing the future of green building codes, which he says has become “a burning issue at the state and local level.” Listen as he talks about the ICC’s new green construction code, which the council launched last month.
