Something for Everyone @ Green Festival
If you missed the Green Festival at the Convention Center this past weekend, you missed an incredible event. Luckily event organizers will be posting video and audio of the plethora of speeches to their website in about two weeks. You'll also be able to download speech audio from this year’s upcoming San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago festivals.
The Green Festival is sponsored by Co-Op America and Global Exchange. The event is largely volunteer-run, with 1300 volunteers, including 125 speakers. Now in its sixth year, this was the fourth time it had been held in D.C., and it is scheduled to be here next fall as well.
DCist was there, and some of the highlights are below the jump.
Photo courtesy of the Green Festival.
Exhibitors
All exhibitors pass a difficult screening process to ensure they are green, organic and worker-friendly, so the Green Festival was a great place to find socially conscious products, including retailers of clothing, crafts, makeup, bike gear, home supplies, vegetarian food, and fair trade coffee, tea and chocolate. Evidenced by the often lengthy line at the ATM outside the festival doors, many visitors were finding plenty of products on which to spend their cash.
One could find a vast selection of products made out of the most surprising of materials, including paper notebooks made out of 75% elephant dung, handbags made out of recycled plastic bags and recycled sail cloths, and baskets made out of recycled chopsticks. Additionally, many of the exhibitors, such as Me to We Style, donate a portion of profits to charity. Me to We’s ever-so-soft t-shirts are made of combinations of bamboo and organic cotton. Fifty percent of all profits benefit their charity partner, Free the Children, a youth-driven organization which has built more than 450 schools throughout the world, providing education to more than 40,000 children.
The Festival also had a number of green building and home remodeling exhibitors, including the ECO Supply Center, which designs, builds and distributes green building products for commercial and residential interiors. The ECO Supply Center’s display products included a beautiful “black metal” and salvaged ash hardwood chair, with the “black metal” material actually being paperstone obsidian, which is made of 100% recycled post-consumer paper.
Eco-Art
The Washington Glass School’s Erwin Twimmers’ booth showcased his recycled glass art. All of Twimmers’ work uses discarded window glass to aid his environmentally conscious messages. The title of Silent Spring, pictured, refers to the book that is proclaimed to have begun the environmental movement. In the artwork, Twimmer recorded his young son saying “help,” and re-created his voice wave in yellow neon behind semi-transparent membrane-like glass. Read more about Twimmers in our recent interview.
Photo courtesy Erwin Twimmers.
Speakers
In addition to the vast array of information and goods available at exhibitors' booths, six speakers were scheduled each hour from 11am to close on both Saturday and Sunday. Topics covered just about everything green, including eco-friendly travel, climate change solutions, nuclear power, social investing, green careers, green remodeling, and clean energy, as well as more generally political topics such as Ralph Nader’s The Road to Corporate Fascism and Medea Benjamin’s Iraq, Iran and the Peace Movement: A New Strategy.
Upcoming Green Festivals include November 9,10 and 11 in San Francisco, April 12 and 13 in Seattle, and May 17 and 18 in Chicago.