Last year, I attended Greenbuild for the first time. Slightly overwhelmed by the huge number of vendors and the huger mass of attendees – and all these special requests to walk to the site, bring a water bottle, separate trash into three separate cans – I remember squeezing into that opening plenary. Ten (twenty?) minutes in, after learning about green initiatives hitting schools, Rick Fedrizzi, president, ceo and founding chairman of the U.S. Green Building Council, asked the audience to raise their hand to identify themselves by political party.
I froze, then simply sat there, dumbstruck by Fedrizzi’s odd mix of passion and in-your-face rhetoric. He made the future sound promising, but also… bleak. The battle cry was “We are right!” and although it was hard not to agree, it was even harder to get on board with this militant message.
This year, I was heartened to see a healthy fraction of the show’s 30,000-plus attendees crammed in to hear Hillary Clinton (who even wore green, by the way) talk about how green is coming to the forefront of political debates. “Green construction and retrofitting would create millions of good jobs that cannot be outsourced,” she pointed out. But I was even more excited to witness Fedrizzi celebrating green, instead of merely defending it.
“Listening to Rick backstage, I felt like I was at a revival,” Clinton said after grabbing the mic, and she was right. Every Greenbuild has that rock concert moment. But the idea that, “Hope for green building's future is hope for our society and economy,” hit home with me.
Yes, the neighbors are double bagging the recycling and it’s rejected by the city week after week. Yes, my 14-year-old car is belching out something that’s almost certainly a carcinogen. But our city government just approved a streetcar project to bring tourism dollars and renewed interested in public transportation to Cincinnati. Philadelphia, renowned for its grit, was celebrated as the host site of Greenbuild and one of the nation’s greenest large cities, according to its mayor.
On the retail front, savvier designers are demanding green at fair market rates. And cradle-to-cradle concerns have suppliers competing to lower off-gassing and show greater transparency for who produced what, when and how. LEED v4’s focus on holistic, sustainable building and design is forcing designers – and their clients – away from greenwashed, pseudo-environmentally friendly products toward buildings that actually perform.
All in all, not a bad year for Fedrizzi, or green, either.