Getting ready for Greenbuild

Here comes Greenbuild again. It keeps getting bigger. For instance, last year there were 480 exhibitors in the expo hall... this year, over 800. I've got the expo hall on the brain. Like last year, I've been mapping which of the exhibitors do and don't have products listed in GreenSpec. There's about 300 — something over a third of the hall. Frankly, I feel really good that there's about 500 exhibitors at this year's Greenbuild that don't meet the high GreenSpec standards. A couple days ago I wrote here that "GreenSpec is a 'best of the best' directory reserved for the top 10% or so of the most environmentally preferable products available... intended to be a reference to the best stuff we know about, and a launching pad for additional research," and that "Attempting to create and maintain a fully comprehensive compendium of everything that's even slightly green would not only be practically undoable, it would actually be much less useful in defining high benchmarks." Sure, there's undoubtedly a quite a good few new products that we'll learn about there, and some of them will end up added to the directory. Most of them won't. Here's a graphic of the expo floor; booths highlighted in green represent manufacturers with one or more products in GreenSpec. The variety of booth sizes is another encouraging sign to me — big fish or small fry, it doesn't matter. (Stay alert! Here it Comes: The Year of Greenwash)