"Go Green" goes big

NOTE: SEE UPDATE BELOW

Tomorrow morning sees the opening of one of the biggest green events in our town (and one which, not incidentally, our papers are co-sponsoring): The Go Green Expo at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

The first day of the three-day event focuses on Business-to-Business concerns, then on the weekend proper it goes wider to encompass anything and everything green-related that regular Philly residents might want to see or hear about. Regular E2P readers may remember our series of posts off of the Green Festival in D.C. back in November, and there will of course be plenty of overlap with some of the ideas and companies that were there. The planners also promise a similarly carbon-neutral gala, which is commendable in itself. But for us here in Philadelphia there's a unique opportunity not just to get the lay of the Green landscape but to familiarize ourselves with the people and businesses right in our backyard who are doing great stuff in this area.

These range from heavy-lifting industries like Heat Shed, a PA company specializing in solar heat (transitioning now from solar hot water to solar photovoltaics), to trade associations like the Professional Recyclers of Pennsylvania, to eco-friendly home-cleaning products like King of Prussia-based Sun & Earth, to local outlets for trendy transport such as Vespa Philadelphia. You can bet there will also be the quirky, unique products, inventions and services that put a green spin on some underserved slice of human experience (Dorm Sweet Dorm's  all-organic "college care packages" being just one example).

Also on tap are speakers on sustainabililty topics, including Charlie Szoradi, founder and president of Green and Save, which you may have encountered in its partnership with philly.com's Green page. The company has a range of services, one key one being training people to do energy audits, something you might remember from ECA's first Q&A column here. But as you will note on the attached podcast, Szoradi has a pretty large and well-worked-out vision that these endeavors are slowly putting in place, and most of it does center around the home.

More and more, people are looking at their living space, what goes into it and what comes out of it, and gauging how much of that is consistent with their needs as well as their philosophy. Szoradi has been studying and advocating for this since the early '90s and puts it all in perspective this way: "Now is the time to treat the home as an organism, versus an object. How it relates to the land, how you use those utilities like electricity and like fossil fuels and water and how you filter air... It's about home smarts. This is truly going back to the fundamentals of how we can live more intelligently among our immediate family, among the immediate community, but then [also] among the greater region and ultimately the country and the planet."

Now is the time, and the Pennsylvania Convention Center is the place. Maybe we'll see you there!

UPDATE: Originally this item stated that Mayor Nutter would be cutting the ribbon "Tomorrow morning," meaning Friday morning. Mayor Nutter will be doing his ribbon cutting on Saturday morning. Earth to Philly regrets the error.