EcoBuild

I have to admit that eco build was a little disappointing this year. The three day event that started on the 1st this month seemed to be filled primarily with solar panel companies. I went with not much of an agenda and was just aiming to look around and with the hope of finding any interesting companies especially for exterior lighting. Unfortunately I could barely find any exterior lighting companies. One of the most interesting was Pavegen Systems http://www.pavegensystems.com/ which relies on kinetic energy generated when pedestrians would walk across the Pavegen Paving lighting up the luminaries. The company boasts that within a high traffic area such as shopping centre it could only take 5 hours to charge enough energy to light up a whole shop front. This company was very inspiring and I felt it was actually one of the only eco companies at Ecobuild as there were many that really weren’t.

One such company which I won’t name specialised in modular granite outdoor furniture. The idea of being able to mix and match certain bench sections when the need change was great. But when I asked where the granite was sourced from the representative mentioned the granite was shipped all the way from china-not particularly eco friendly shipping tons of granite around the world. (No matter the benches weren’t that attractive any way).

The only other company that really interested me was Bamboo Home a company that specialised in laminated bamboo woods for exterior use. Bamboo is apparently the best and most eco friendly hard wood substitute. It grows incredibly fast only four years until it is ready for harvesting. It has similar tensile strength to steel bamboo and is also harder than teak, ipe, oak and maple woods which take hundreds of years to grow and many grow in endangered tropical rainforests. It also has high dimensional stability, meaning less swelling, cupping and shrinkage, and is a lot lighter so is more eco friendly when shipping around the world. The one thing that I found out about this company that doesn’t sound eco friendly is that they don’t recycle the bamboo woods. I am unsure why this is. As long as natural woods and forest aren’t replaced for the production of bamboo crops this looks like a great product.

Here are videos of the two interesting companies mentioned.