Sorting Hucksters from Visionaries

The down-and-dirty bullshitters were easy to spot at the Go Green Expo.

by Bruce Schimmel

One of the pleasures of attending any convention is to soak up the pitchmen's schtick.

Sign me up for a case.

So, with great expectations I recently attended the Go Green Expo at the Pennsylvania Convention. Making its way from L.A. to New York and Atlanta, the 200-plus exhibitor confab billed itself as "Philly's first eco-friendly business and consumer show."

The special thrill of this show was to separate the visionaries from the hucksters, the breakthroughs from the bullshit. Which, in the emerging green marketplace, is no simple feat.

The real down-and-dirty bullshitters were the easiest to spot.

Like a certain local daily that had one sign chiding people to "Read Responsibly" and recycle their papers, while another sign urged parents to mail newspapers to kids at college. Oh, yeah. Papers piling up in a dorm: a responsible fire hazard.

Or this bit of green poo: Instead of using gas-guzzlers to haul billboards through Center City, one ad agency offers the eco-innovation of bicyclists. That'll help with traffic, I thought. After motorists run them down.

On the other end of the scale were some genuine innovators. Like green guru Maurice Sampson, now part of a new group called Philadelphia Zero Waste Partners (nicherecycling.com).

Sampson is offering a solution to the problem of off-gassing from kitchen scraps — a surprisingly prolific source of greenhouse gas. To quickly upcycle food waste into rich soil without the gassiness, Sampson has a mechanical composter that's designed for city living.

Another local group, Philly Green Wall and Roof (phillygreenwall.com), also put a new twist on a cool technology.

Green roofs, of course, suck up CO2, and temper a home's climate. But many Philadelphia homes can't support the additional weight. Now, this local company offers a low-mass, low-cost planting system, using recycled plant holders. Lovely!

Finally, from another local company comes something that looks like tea, what Rudy Behrens of Solaris Cybernetics (solariscybernetics.com) calls "Green Coal."

Behrens says this stuff puts out 8,400 BTUs per pound, and creates zero emissions. It's made of algae, and is harvested by self-powered, self-propelled autonomous robots.

That sounds fine. But it's hard to say if Behrens' vision is really, most sincerely green. Who knows what unintended consequences lurk in an algae-fueled future?

In fact, it's hard to figure the larger costs of many of these exhibitors' offerings. Are the organic mattresses, the heat-treated wood, the fluorescent lightbulbs, foam insulation or organic vodka really good for the planet?

What we don't generally know is the entire toll that products, green or otherwise, take. At least not in this country, not yet.

That's changing elsewhere. In Britain, today, when you buy a bag of potato chips (or crisps), you learn much more than its price and calories. You're told its impact.

A bag of Walker Crisps, for instance, is responsible for about twice its weight, some 2.4 ounces, in carbon emissions. Coincidentally, the same U.S.-based corporation makes Lay's Potato Chips. But we Americans are left in the dark.

It's time for our nation to catch up on its environmental accounting. We need to be able to quickly evaluate all the impacts of our buying choices, from chips to roofs.

Until we do, it'll be hard to tell the hucksters from the visionaries. Only then will we know — as I said to one conventioneer who offered colorful cards made from elephant dung — whether something is good shit or bad.

(bruce@schimmel.com)