Ecobuild 2012

Oh I’m knackered. And hormonal.

We first went to Ecobuild back in 2008 when it was at Earl’s Court and was a fairly small affair, very much inventors and small scale sellers, there was a food stall from River Cottage, ‘talent scouts’ in evidence for Dragons Den and Grand Designs and just a smattering of solar panels in evidence.

When I got the annual email reminding me to book this years tickets and realised we might just be in Sussex for the dates I booked tickets for us and decided if we could go then we would. I hoped we might see some interesting ideas, get some inspiration and learn something about the sort of eco products that may be there, potentially find some companies or better still individuals we could work with / get sponsorship from / strike a deal with in exchange for reviews / marketing. Ady had read somewhere that in line with the exhibitions eco credentials they were discouraging exhibitors from giving away plastic promotional items or glossy literature to minimise waste.

After debate and checking travel options we decided to drive. We don’t have a travelcard anymore so the train would have been around the same for the four of us as petrol and parking and would have taken longer. Even with the Blackwall tunnel traffic we were still there in under 90 minutes and the same coming home, the train to Victoria takes that long and that’s without getting halfway across London on about four tube changes. I like the train journey up but *hate* it coming home when you can almost never get seats, are knackered from a day in London, fed up of carrying stuff and just want to be anywhere other than a packed train full of stressed people.

We left just after 830am and were parking by 10am. The machine didn’t take my debit card but we just about scratched together enough cash to pay the £15 parking from various places in the car where change was stashed and that was all we spent all day.

We started in the solar area and were stunned by just how many solar panel stands there were, easily 100 plus. Most were distributors rather than manufacturers and almost all were staffed by foreign people, mostly Chinese or Japanese. On one stand, manned by three German people both they and I gave up in the end as they simply couldn’t grasp my question about being off grid and not feeding in to the tariff on the national grid, utterly insistant that you still had to be connected to power… We did speak to one really interesting guy who was very passionate about his product – a Solarator (can’t find it online yet, very new apparently) which is effectively a trailer with two solar panels on it, a bank of batteries inside that can be towed by any vehicle to use / charge up and can also be charged by mains (not really of use to us but could be modified to take wind or hydro charge and have additional batteries added). Really good idea. We exchanged contact details with them and will follow that one up as he loved our story.

Sadly the waffle about lack of plastic tat was not true and the lure of fuzzy bugs, sqashy rubber polar bears and many, many branded mini bags of sweets was too great so the kids acquried a big bag each full of tat. I relented and collected pens (on the basis I’ll always need pens!) and cloth bags (ditto, although not as sure I will always need cloth bags on Rum! Maybe I’ll wash them and use them for curing meat or straining curds and whey or something).

We talked to about five different solar places, several rainwater harvesting places and a few more bio mass type stalls but nothing really excited or interested us. Individuals we talked to were really interested in us, one was an ex student from a uni course on renewable architecture and said a student on his course would *love* the chance to use us as a case study and plan a design solution for us. I had thought of that idea and mooted it to the two ex WWOOF hosts I have invited up to stay who were both permaculture course leaders, but this guy gave us contact details for his old tutor and it inspired me to collect more contact details for other tutors at other unis with similar courses. We’d put the student up and look after them in exchange for their ideas and a copy of their plans for our house / land.

Another product we had been toying with the idea of is mobile road surface type stuff – to create a track through our croftland and as a possible surface for the static and surrounding area. We chatted to two places selling that and both were really interested in our story and we’ll follow up both contacts. This sort of stuff .

We tracked down Babs’ friend and her yurt and chatted to Bo for a while, she is lovely :). Shared our woe at the ‘greenwash’ of the whole show and lack of alternative, human products with far too many big companies having stuck the word ‘eco’ in some of their marketing, dressed silly blonde girls with long legs in green outfits and armed them with lots of plastic keyrings to give away. That restored our faith in what we’re doing :).

We ate our lunch sat outside right next to the Thames. It was both charming and depressing there in the shadow of the Dome with planes landing all but next to us. Ady and I can still talk the talk with these sort of people at these sorts of venues but frankly we’d really rather not. Give us some chickens and gorgeous scenery and we’ll be far happier 🙂

By about 4pm we’d all seen pretty much everything. We’d already decided not to go to the seminars as none of them seemed really pertinent to what we’re doing and we thought the kids would find them fairly tedious. I collected various magazines so I could look through for interesting articles and see if any had contacts that might be interested in my writing and we headed back to the car.

We were glad we’d gone, we spoke to enough people who were interested in what we’re doing and potentially do have products that are relevant to us to make it worthwhile. I wouldn’t go again though, I feel it’s gotten far too commercial and instead of genuinely celebrating eco products and green building it is a big money making machine with the focus on business rather than environment. I know our choices are very extreme and out there and most people are shuddering at the very thought of our lifestyle but I would have expected a little more representation of the more alternative and hippy dippy type stuff at Ecobuild really. Certainly when the kids and I went to Green Aware in 2010 there was still plenty of that there and I’d have thought it was one area there is still plenty of room for little people to be making their mark.

Still on the plus side I won’t need to buy pens for years.

Back at home we had an early dinner as we’d managed to pick up two reduced to clear cooked chickens in the CoOp. We watched The Good Life to restore faith in our craziness and the kids had a fairly early night. They are currently making a robot up in Davies’ old bedroom using bits of old computers and other technology they have been dismantling. It looks very cool 🙂

I had a very long bath and a very chocolately hot chocolate and am now feeling very ready for bed having gone through all the brochures we picked up and created a long list of places to contact, websites to look at and products to learn more about.