I’d like to make it easy for you to attend West Coast Green 2007.  This will mark our 1st year as a premiere Media Partner with the nation’s largest residential green building conference and trade show. The event takes place on September 20-22, 2007, at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, CA. The first two days of the conference are reserved for trade only, and on day three, the doors open to homeowners. 

Taking a walk on the trade show floor of West Coast Green will provide you with hundreds of ideas on how to green your home; from simple items like eco-friendly paints and sustainable home furnishings to building a green home from the ground up.  West Coast Green has gone the distance to find and showcase the best green building resources, exhibits, trainings, presentations, and educational tracks, while ensuring you have an unparalleled experience.

Highlights for 2007 include:

• 275 exhibitors displaying the latest in green design and building products
• 250 renowned speakers and visionaries
• The Futures Room – filled with green innovations soon to come
• Green Built Pre-fabricated Home – designed by Michelle Kaufmann and built by Extreme Homes, to be placed on City County Plaza directly across from West Coast Green for the duration of the conference and will be open for West Coast Green attendees to tour (the mkLotus).

As a special gift, I’m proud to announce, by the generosity of West Coast Green, a 20% discount on your full conference registration.  Please enter the following promotional code when registering to receive discount:  jg3554.  Register at West Coast Green or call 1-800-724-4880. 

My wife sent me this article from Perez Hilton about Brad Pitt, who will be appearing on NBC’s Today with Ann Curry to talk about his green development project in New Orleans.  I’m not a reader of the celebrity sites, so I would have missed this, but the New Orleans development project is really moving along.  And the green houses they are building are 100% incredible.  Brad has good style — it fits so well with Jetson Green, we should just bring him on as a regular writer! 

Global Green broke ground on the Holy Cross Project on May 10.  Yesterday, they unveiled the progress on this first home, which is still under construction.  It’s going to be a showcase home, but in total, the Holy Cross Project will have 5 homes and 18 apartments.  All of them will be affordable and green.  The goals of the project are to achieve LEED Platinum certification (LEED-H for the single family homes and LEED-NC for the other buildings), net zero energy, and carbon neutral building. By using solar panels, high performance building design, HVAC systems, energy and resource monitoring systems, and energy efficient appliances, the buildings in the Holy Cross Project will use at least 75% less energy than typical buildings. In addition, Global Green is also exploring the use of river turbines in the adjacent Mississipi River.

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A home doesn’t need to be modern to be green, but I like the modern ones.  I’d love to see entire neighborhoods of modern green homes.  I like the idea of changing the way we perceive the single-family home, too.  Denser neighborhoods?  Sure.  Residential wind turbines?  Definitely.  Solar on the roof?  You bet.  But right now, we’re still in the early stages of recognizing legitimate green homes.

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I’m excited about this post.  When it comes to surface materials, there’s a lot out there, and I’ve blogged about a few companies that have good products.  Concrete countertops appear on house flipping-type shows every now and then, so I thought it was time we all got to know VitraStone.  VitraStone products are made from 70-85% recycled content (post consumer & post industrial) such as recycled glass and fly ash blended with a proprietary mix of ceramic cement.  Products in the VitraStone line up include vessel sinks, sink tops, countertop systems, back splash, floor tiles, wall cladding, and furniture and accessories.  VitraStone is strong, too.  Scratch and chip resistant.  Freeze/thaw cycle resistant.  Mold resistant.  VitraStone products come in a variety of colors (as you will see below) for interior and exterior applications.  No off-gassing here. 

Couple cool things about VitraStone:  (1) you may get LEED credits for using these materials, and (2) VitraStone offers free design services to create 3-dimensional layouts for client approvals (or they’ll work directly with architectural specifications).  Matter of fact, the green building store here in Salt Lake City carries VitraStone, so maybe I can push the old landlord into a green kitchen renovation?  Any thoughts …

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It looks like Best Buy is upping its green cred with the recent announcement that starting in early- to mid-2008, all future Best Buy stores will be built to LEED standards.  In all honesty, the retail sector has been kind of slow to adopt programs such as LEED.  But this is starting to change.  Best Buy has the in-house architect and senior facilities manager working on getting LEED accredited right now.  Additionally, the company plans to get its eco-prototype store certified by the end of the year.  The eco-prototype will have energy-efficient lighting, rainwater recycling, recycled content building materials, a high-efficiency HVAC system, and some sort of day lighting system.

Best Buy’s greening will go beyond the new stores also.  Before the end of the fiscal year, it plans to increase its use of reusable containers by 30 percent; retrofit 20 percent of its 650+ stores with dimmable, zonable ceramic metal halide lights; and recycle 75,000 tons of cardboard, 1,800 tons of plastic, 15,000 tons of consumer electronics, and 27,500 tons of appliances.  Via MBJ.