The annual Green Cities conference wrapped up in March for another year, and GECA was proud to be greatly involved as a supporting sponsor.
As well as being a supporting sponsor, we worked with our clients to furnish some of the conference and pre-conference areas with GECA certified furniture, as Production Partners to the event. It was great to see so many attendees enjoying and taking advantage of all the GECA certified furniture at the venue –Aspect’s ‘standing zone’ in the conference was widely used during speaker sessions, and we even spotted someone catching up on lost sleep in Zenith’s Agile Work Space zone! Thanks also to StyleCraft and Dunlop Foam for furnishing the GECA coffee lounge, which proved to be a popular spot to refuel on fair trade coffee and tea, and KE-ZU created a fantastic lounge area of their own.
The Green Building Council of Australia announced their partnership with the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), an organisation that focuses specifically on the health and wellbeing aspects of buildings. IWBI Founder, Paul Scialla, spoke of the “tremendous opportunity for the wellness, sustainability and real estate communities in Australia to come together to support human health through the buildings where we spend more than 90 percent of our time.”
Greater promotion of the WELL Building Standard throughout Australia will highlight the importance of health and wellbeing as being a key component of ‘sustainability’ overall, and it will be exciting to see how this plays out in the industry. It’s also great news for our GECA certified clients, who already have demonstrable proof of their products’ health and wellbeing credentials through their GECA certification.
The conference also examined Asia’s green growth, highlighting the innovation from Singapore and Japan as examples of doing green building well – and pointing out that what we may see as ‘disruptive’ is seen as ‘business as usual’ overseas. This strong green market in Asia is more good news for Australian manufacturers making genuinely green products and looking to export those internationally.
