In no particular order here is a short list of some of the new green offerings I noticed at the 2010 Philadelphia Go Green Expo that took place April 16 to April 18 at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks PA.
1. Composting with worms may not be new to you. I have been composting for years. Most of the time, I am just creating a compost pile similar to what I saw in my neighbors’ garden while growing up. Lately I decided to take a more organized approach to composting. I have experimented with a tumbler and food scrap eating bacteria. All this with various levels of success.
I know that earth worms work since that is what Terracycle has been using worms for years to produce its worm juice. Ed Mullock runs a worm farm and sells Vermiculture equipment and supplies . I got particularly interested in the Worm Factory that enable gardeners to produce high quality, odorless compost.
See a short video from NBC 10 on the Green Expo and on the Worm Factory, right here: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1V3tBvfKls&feature=player_embedded]
2. The first applications of the next generation of highly efficient light appliances based on LED technology are appearing on the market. An early entry in the field of commercial applications of LED Technology to the lighting of public spaces is TerraGlo.
TerraGlo is a startup based in Ivyland PA that has developed and is distributing a line of LED Light Appliances for Commercial applications. The company was founded by Laura Giuliano on initial work on LED Lights done by her father who runs Cal-Chip Electronics Corporation. Shorthly after graduating from Lehigh University, Laura started researching possible applications of LED light technology with Brian, a family friend. The results of their market research was so encouraging that they decided to start a company. TerraGlo’s line of commercial light fixtures that you can see in the image to the left, is due out in May. I expanded more on Laura Giuliano and TerraGlo in this follow-up article.
3. Have ever tried to clean your kitchen sink strainer?
Or your bathtub hair stainer?? Not a pleasant experience either way.
Most strainers are made of steel wire mesh, I try to empty the food particles caught in the kitchen sink strainer in my compost bin. Typically, the best I can do is to unclog the stainer – however the steel wire mesh strainer is never really clean.
That is where the biodegradable strainers from Dansa LLC come handy.
- They are very inexpensive,
- They can be easily cleaned and reused
- They are biodegradable as they are made of corn starch.
In other words, after a couple of month, I can just throw the strainer from Dansa LLC in my compost bin, replace it with a brand new corn starch strainer and not worry about bacterial infection. Here is a Youtube video that gives you the a full demonstration of this ingenious idea.
4. The Rain Tube distributed by The Rain Tube of Philadelphia is an ingenious tubing system made of recycled High Density Polyethylne (HDPE) that protect your gutters from filling up with debris. The manufacturer of this invention claims that the RainTube can collect up to 100 inches of rain/hour.
Collecting you rain water important for multiple reasons:
1. The Philadelphia Water Department changed the way it computes its billing to account for the amount of storm water your house is putting back into the storm drainage system of the city. The more water you dump, the more you pay.
2. In warmer, dryer parts of the country, the battle over who controls access and distribution of fresh water is already raging. Over time, control over access to fresh water is only going worse. It is totally absurd to use fresh and expensive potable water to flush our toilets, water our gardens or wash cars with. Why not use rain water? That is what the RainSpace product from RainTech is about.
The idea of the RainTube or of Gutter Guard is to let water flow into your gutter and from there to the storm drainage system and keep leaves, branches and debris of all kinds away from blocking or getting into your gutters, therefore sparing you the regular effort of having to clean your roof gutters. As much as the idea of the RainTube or of the Gutter Guard is appealing, I am not sure whether any of those brilliantly simple ways to spare ourselves the work of actually cleaning your house gutters actually meet expectations. Here is a Youtube video from someone who actually tested different Gutter Guard installations: See [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_UnPTFi6RA].
If you are interested in what the Rain Tube can do for you, I would suggest you make the effort of collecting usage information from other house owners who actually have had it installed for a while in the gutters of their own house.
5. I was intrigued by the presence of a few Asian companies:
Eco Creation International Inc. of Englewood Cliff NJ is the US Subsidiary of a Korean company distributing a “Reverse Vending Machine“. The Reverse Vending Machine is a Recyclable Collection machine that collects up to 1,000 glass bottles and up to 1,200 Aluminum Cans. The idea is that consumers would receive reward points for each glass bottle and for each Aluminum can they recycle. In a way this is a different version of the service created by the Recycle Bank.
Kyoko Omae distributes Gaina products in the US. Gaina is product developed by Nissin Sangyo Ltd of Japan.
Gaina is high performance roof coating that has thermal insulation properties.
The brochure list a 40% decrease in long term heating and cooling costs between before vs after application of the Gaina coating. That is plenty enough to take notice.
