For those outside of the land Down Under, most people remain unaware of aquaponics. Australian farmers continue to use this sustainable way to grow fish and vegetables due to their continuing extreme drought conditions.

The concept behind aquaponics can be explained rather simply. The water and fish poop from the tank move upward into the stone filled bed which feeds the plants. The hydroton pebbles, imported from Germany, have bacteria that absorb the fish poop then convert the poop to nitrites then nitrates which is fertilizer. Okay, we’re not chemists but when Kevin Warnock who put this contraption together using parts from Costco and a fish supply place shows us that the plants grow six times faster than in dirt and the fish grow twice as fast as in the wild we have to think that this may be a good idea.

Even better, consider the water that can be saved. Not only do the vegetables use about 1/10th the water of vegetables grown in dirt but the systems needs no chemicals to clean the water. Kevin only adds water (for the fish and fish food) but no cleaners, chemicals or pesticides.

People can put this contraption in their patios for about $1000 or so but it works an a larger scale in Oz. Sign us up a veggie and fish farmers because with a sustainable system like this we could get used to eating salmon salad.

The crowds seemed a little thin on the first day at San Francisco’s Moscone Center but things will probably pick up during day two. One place where the crowd packed into the space was to see noted organic architect Eric Corey freed. The noted sustainable Howard Roark never disappoints in his presentations no matter the setting.

Freed offered his usual collection of bold, entertaining, outrageous slides to accompany his presentation. (Where does he get those photos?) A good portion of his 20 minute presentation focused on the car and how we have designed our society around the auto. Besides sprinkling in car facts such as the average American spends 84 hours stuck in traffic, and 94 percent of cars remain parked. So why do we have a love affair with our cars? Cars only destroy community which rings true in places like LA and Houston.

Even though Freed makes his living as a noted architect, his presentation weighed so heavily against the car that you might think that he changed his profession to bicycle inventor. His anti-car discussion eventually lead to several ideas to fix cities so that they change into people friendly instead of car friendly areas:

1-     Ban the lawns and replace with victory gardens.

2-     No straight streets.

3-     Require porous roads and lots to reduce water waste

4-     Make solar available as an over the counter purchase

5-     Bring back corner stores. This one we might not totally agree with unless the corner stores actually sell something besides processed crap.

6-     Encourage local real estate developers so that houses don’t look cookie cutter all over the US.

It’s good to have to someone thinking out of the box even if his requirements run on a slightly fascist model.

On the creatively intriguing side, we walked into the Icynene Inc. display booth only knowing that they create their Icynene LD-R-50 spray foam insulation partially from Castor oil. Honestly, we didn’t exactly know the origin of Castor oil. Castor oil comes from Castor beans (not true beans from Castor plant) and don’t serve a normal food source, so not food for insulation here. Castor crops don’t require pesticides or fungicides or even water to grow and are rapidly renewable. For this insulation, they use 15 eight percent castor oil (and unfortunately 85 92 percent polyglycol, which in our eyes is like using B15 B8 biodiesel. Fifteen Eight percent is better than zero percent but still a long way to go. This product helps eliminate dust, pollen and contains no VOCs as it is water blown. Most traditional cellulose insulation comes from 80% newspaper (up to100% post-consumer recycled) and 20% binders and fire-retardants, commonly borax, boric acid, sulfuric acid, ammonium sulfates and/or other chemical compounds. Smell the goodness.

One of the most disappointing aspects of PCBC would be the continual greenwashing that some organizations and companies wish to convey to the public and trade. The SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) had booth and lots of literature about how they which on the surface seems on the track to be doing the right thing with their Green certification but if you check below the tree cover it might not seem so verdant.

Most Green people would be disillusioned with the fact that SFI finds its roots firmly planted with the lumber companies which of course offers no value. Then they somewhat cleaned up their legitimacy a few years ago by creating third party certification, publicly available standards and a more transparent process.

We met the Director of Green Building for SFI at the PCBC booth where he did the hard sell offering such info that they continue to push the USGBC to include SFI certified wood in the LEED standard. To us, it seems like a lot of lobbying and less to do with the legitimacy of the certification.

When it comes down to it, the SFI wants people to think that they reign superior or even equal to FSC certification but take a look at some of the comparisons where SFI allows:

-use of genetically modified trees

- logging close to rivers and streams that harms water supplies

-use of toxic chemicals while FSC does not allow these in the forests.

And we can go on and on but as they say a picture is worth a thousand words so check out the SFI versus FSC forest land photo courtesy of heartofgreen.

‘nuff said.