Green Festival 2008 - The San Fran stop
At the San Francisco pit stop of this past weekends Green Festival, while trying to avoid the masses searching for samples of organic this and sustainable that, one of San Francisco’s green builders Chris Connors mentioned to a few of us attendees, “Wow this festival has gotten big.” Indeed, for those who haven’t attended in a few years – yes, the festival continues to grow faster than FSC certified bamboo.
For those lucky enough not to suffer from green claustrophobia, attendees could choose from a potpourri of Green rock stars – such as Van Jones who spoke about the new green collar economy, the incredibly interesting and sometimes bizarre Paul Stamets who seems like the Fox Mulder of the mushroom world and the dynamic food sovereignty trio of Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Giménez and Miguel Altieri who, among other things, discussed how the food shortage is an ecological issue not just a political topic.
Taking a break from the speakers, we had to cruise the exhibitor marketplace. With so much to choose from we took a look at the numerous additions to the myriad vender booths. Myriad, as in about 50 percent of these companies use this festival for marketing or promote a “green lifestyle”. Okay, we’re not going to call it outright greenwashing but some of these businesses really milk this whole green thing. Of course we’re happy to see new honest additions (or at least venders that we have not seen before here) such as Mozilla and we can and should throw our support behind the community powered, open source FireFox Browser.
With more additions come some subtractions. Most notably, what happened to Burt’s Bees? We heard that the lip balm buzzers got 86ed from the festival because they happened to be owned by uh — who was that again? – oh yes, Clorox. No problem there but then the green playing field needs to be level right? So, that means no Ben and Jerry’s (even if they switched to all organic ingredients). So, what’s the deal with Honest Tea? The Coke owned or partially owned company had booth in the middle of food sample frenzy. What gives?
The deal with Honest Tea is a pretty cool company. Coke bought 40% so Honest could get their distribution. There are now two parts of the company so if your store started carrying the plastic bottles, these are distributed through Coke. If you want them to get the glass bottles back in stock, they need to check to see which distributors have those direct from Honest Tea or through UNFI.