Go Greener, Australia

On Saturday we went to the Master Builders HomeStyle Show & Sustainable Energy Expo at the Perth Convention & Exhibition Centre. We learned 3 things:

1. It’s very hard to get to the PCEC carpark when you are coming from Riverside Drive.
2. There’s a bit of greenwash going on at the Sustainable Energy Expo.
3. The greenwash wasn’t nearly as scary as the affluenza and excess consumption going on at the HomeStyle Show in the other half of the room.

We chatted with some lovely people who sell bamboo flooring and low-VOC paints, and with people representing the Sustainable Transport Alliance and the state government’s Sustainable Energy Development Office. We also got a quote for a solar hot-water system.

We were a bit puzzled by the promotion of curtains as eco-friendly - I mean, yeah, they’re good at regulating the temperature of your home so you don’t waste energy heating and cooling it, but most people have them already. And we were a bit annoyed that some of the vendors wouldn’t let you get away without giving you a dead-tree brochure - those just went straight into the recycling box when we got home.

We boggled at the saunas, enormous home theatres, and useless kitchen gadgets in the other half of the expo. There were some truly wasteful products being pushed.

On the whole, it was much the same as last year - a few new things, some friendly people demonstrating their eco-friendly products, a few hard-sellers pushing things of questionable value. We did get some really useful information and some products to look for when we get to various renovating projects in our house, though, and it was a nice enough way to spend a morning.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 5:40 pm and is filed under events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.