Green Options

English tours at Japan’s largest eco-fair show international visitors the hottest green gadgets from a country renown for technological innovation.

At RICOH booth, we saw the demonstration of a new erasable advance paper. Printed document on this advance paper can be erased by ironing and be ready for another round of printing.

I had an opportunity to take the English guided tour at Eco-Products 2008. The Eco-Products exhibition is one of the largest green fairs in Japan, showing all kinds of green products and services to the public. The event draws a large number of visitors. It’s possibly the world’s largest event of its kind. The tenth Eco-Products 2008 exhibition was successful enough to attract 173,917 visitors this year according to the event organizer.

Visitors came from all over the world to see the latest of Japanese green activities. To accommodate such foreign visitors, guided tours in English, Chinese and Korean, were offered for free by volunteer staff from Japan for Sustainability (JFS) and EcoNetworks (ENW). The English guided tours were offered twice during the three-day event, but you needed to register for the tour beforehand at JFS’s website.

Our tour was guided by Frank H. Ling Ph.D. from USA, who works as a researcher for the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies in Japan. Our group had five visitors including me plus a lead guide, Mr. Ling, with a few more staff for additional assistance.

In preparing for this new job, writing for GO Media’s Sustainablog and Planetsave blog, I was picking up green magazines, green newspaper articles, advertisements for green books and goods, and thinking (even more than normal) about green living, green lifestyles, and how we are going to find ourselves out of the mess we have put ourselves in.

It is a complicated situation we’ve put ourselves in. Beyond the water quality and air quality problems we’ve had for more than a century, we are now facing global climate change, there is concern about ‘peak oil’ and all of the ramifications related to that issue (including drilling for oil in ecological world treasures), and there are increasing concerns about the sustainability of our global food systems and how we are going to feed our future generations. Cities and stores are just now starting to ban plastic bags, realizing after a few decades that a product that will not disappear for thousands of years should not be reproduced.

We are facing very complicated issues that are a result of the very unnatural and complicated things and systems we have created in recent times.

How do we address these problems and concerns?

As Albert Einstein said a few years ago,