GreenSummit, which started last year as a few tents on the Tempe campus Student Services lawn, attracted nearly 10,000 people to the Phoenix Convention Center on Friday and Saturday.
The large-scale sustainability event featured a two-day Green Innovations Expo and an Advancing Sustainability Conference sponsored by ASU’s School of Sustainability.
“We wanted to show people sustainability isn’t just a key word — it is a whole new way of looking at things,” said Chris Samila, founder and director of GreenSummit.
Samila, a global studies and political science senior, started GreenSummit as a student project last year.
The project attracted a surprisingly large crowd — about 4,000 people — to the Student Services lawn in April 2007. It was then that Samila realized its potential.
Within a year, Samila transformed the small initiative into one of the largest sustainability conferences in the country.
“The goal of the summit was to accelerate the ‘go green’ movement,” Samila said.
Attendees included more than 100 big businesses and companies, local consumers and a delegation from Eastern Europe brought by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
The conferences and expo showed consumers simple ways to incorporate sustainable living into their everyday lives.
“We wanted to bring together a diverse range of companies that could help consumers and businesses understand where to start to reach toward a sustainable future,” Samila said.
Local companies displayed products ranging from energy-efficient light bulbs to organic makeup at the expo.
“My hope is consumers will eventually learn to demand products that don’t hurt them,” Samila said.
The event received an overwhelming amount of support from ASU students and faculty.
“ASU’s support was essential to the success of GreenSummit,” said James McCay, the event’s volunteer manager. “They helped raise awareness through the process of education.”
Sustainability graduate student Andrea Baty said she enjoyed volunteering at GreenSummit because it gave her the opportunity to network with businesses that shared her same environmental goals.
“In my mind, the summit is about getting corporate businesses and the public to work together to create a more sustainable environment,” Baty said.
McCay said the summit achieved exactly what it set out to do.
“Our world is in a period of unprecedented rate of change that touches countless areas of our lives, and most people are still unaware,” McCay said. “The summit provided a public forum for a host of these considerations.”
An address from ASU President Michael Crow kicked off the conferences, which highlighted how going green affects industries, communities and the natural environment.
The topics discussed at the conferences ranged from energy-efficient building techniques to bath products and organic foods from local producers.
Samila said he was also pleased with the success of the 2008 GreenSummit and is already planning for the 2009 GreenSummit in Atlanta.
Eventually Samila said he would like to see the summit reach all four corners of the country.
“This is the generation that decides,” Samila said. “We can either turn the ship around or continue blindly in the direction we were going.”
