Outdoor Industries Support Sustainable Efforts

We are getting ready for the Interbike Trade Show, starting on Wednesday, Sept. 27th. The past few weeks have been a flurry of activity, creative energy, and some good-natured stress. In a few days, in what seems to be a few minutes, it will all be over and we will be laughing about the things we were worrying about.

The headline of this post is a good thing. Tradeshows and expos consume many thousands of megawatt hours of electricity yearly, and the fossil fuel emissions associated with the airline transportation for the hundreds of thousands of global attendees is an important contributor to green house gas emissions. At least it's more efficient than everyone driving individually.

I still imagine a day when every last bit of manufactured materials or transportation energy will be reused or created from a sustainable source. Well, 100% reuse may not be physically possible, but any part of the item that does not get remanufactured will dissolve harmlessly into the environment. Utopian? Yes. Hopelessly utopian? No.