At the 11th annual Greenprints Conference and Trade show in Atlanta, Georgia this past Wednesday and Thursday, the overall message was loud and clear; building and retrofitting green is and will be the only way forward for commercial real estate and home owners.

As I made my way into a crowded conference room at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta, you could feel that finally, people are taking green seriously. This wasn’t a room full of tree hugging hippies and global warming activists preaching to save the planet, but a room full of professionals who are bringing a smarter way of living to a world that has up til now, quite frankly, lived vicariously through excess consumption.

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[Creative Commons photo by Steve Hardy]

That might not sound like a huge reduction, and I know that 7% (or 37,800 metric tons of greenhouse gases) isn’t going to save the world, but it’s a good first step! It’s the equivalent of 179 rail cars’ worth of coal or protecting 239 acres of from deforestation.

The City of Atlanta released a Sustainability Report outlining where they’re at and where they plan to go in terms of lowering the city’s carbon footprint.

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