Green Options

For three days this week, St. Louis was host to the US Green Building Council’s Greening the Heartland conference.  Focusing on green building and sustainability, this year’s conference theme was “Embracing Change ‘08.”  It featured a strong lineup of speakers and educational programs, workshops, a bike tour of sustainable buildings, a tour of the LEED gold certified St. Louis Community College Wildwood campus, a tour of the LEED platinum certified Alberici headquarters, and a hall for exhibitors.  Educational programs were grouped into government, corporate, green communities, and education tracks.

Though I was mainly interested in kitchen and bath products like IceStone, PaperStone, and Vetrazzo countertops and Koch & Co. cabinets, I found myself sitting down with exhibitors who had something new and interesting to present, like the guys from Huntleigh McGehee, who specialize in Green Insurance, which I plan to write more about next week.  Other exhibitors showed off windmill technology, natural insulation, SIPs panels, sustainable printing, green design/architecture firms, solar shades, green roofs, and much more.

Imagine you are Vancouver. Or Beijing. You have this obscure little event called the Olympics to host. There will be a short term high volume burst of people coming. Or you’re hosting a conference that regularly outstrips the available hotel capacity of the city you host it in, producing frustration, high costs, and long commutes for those having to stay out of town.

What do you do? Build more hotels? That’s one solution, but what about the rest of the year, when there is a lower, more typical demand, and you’re left with capacity far exceeding needs, and resources were used to build these hotels that could have been used elsewhere?

Abilmo, a French company, has a possible solution: They make foldable hotel rooms. Come again? Yes, they have been able to fabricate accommodations that can be set up, without a crane, as many as 25 erected in a day. And they’re not shabby, either.