Ventura County Firms to Strut Their Stuff at L.A.’s ECO EXPO : Businesses represented at the event range from those that promote clean air and water to fashion concerns.
High fashion, high-tech, high performance and, best of all, high environmental quality are what you’re going to find if you check out this year’s Ventura County contingent to ECO EXPO.
Several Ventura County-based businesses, which specialize in environmentally preferred products and services, will be strutting their stuff at the Los Angeles Convention Center beginning today. The fourth annual ECO EXPO being held there all day Saturday and Sunday will be preceded today and Friday by a special Green Business Conference.
All this is dedicated to the idea that environmentalism can be a healthy thing for businesses as well as consumers--not a regulatory burden or a hair shirt, as it’s been portrayed.
Washington is dispatching Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary and U. S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to show the flag.
Here’s our county’s eco-team:
You’ve probably heard of high fashion items made from organic fibers such as cotton, hemp and wool.
But how about “wearable art,” as Thousand Oaks designer Lindsay Jackson calls it, made from vintage--that means recycled--drapery fabric?
“Beautiful drapery material is easy to wash to a body-soft touch,” she said when I queried her about the kind of outfit a desperate Scarlett O’Hara made from the drapes.
Jackson, who claims never to have seen “Gone With the Wind,” makes altogether modern gear such as flowing palazzo pants, fringed skirts and tank tops out of bolt ends, thrift store and estate-sale acquisitions.
As reported in a prior Earthwatch, cloth makes up a surprisingly large percentage of what we annually send to the landfill, so it’s nice to see it intercepted and put to another purpose so stylishly. You can see examples year-round at Maggie & Me, a boutique in Thousand Oaks.
And while we’re dealing with unusual juxtapositions, how about the case of the man nicknamed “Smoke” who wants to help clean up the county’s smog by selling clean-air trucks? the commercial sales manager for Todey Chevrolet in Oxnard, Kenneth M. (Smoke) Smokoska, has been advertising an ECO TRUCK in the local agricultural trade press.
Todey Chevrolet has been designated an accredited natural gas service location, and Smokoska is determined to put as many clean-burning natural gas work trucks on local farms as he can. As I never tire of pointing out--and Smoke certainly tells prospective clients--these truck engines run two, even three times longer than an ordinary engine without needing an overhaul and whack 30% off an owner’s fuel bills.
Now from clean air to clean water, with the help of two local firms.
Enviro-Reps International Inc. uses a range of products involving living organisms instead of chemicals.
The company calls this “advanced enzyme technologies.” Owner Bob Friedman told me that “every lake in the world has problems with unwanted algae growth (and) everybody with the problem finds us.”
Although most of his customers are commercial fish farmers in Asia, he recently came to the rescue of the Bratkoskis’, a Santa Paula family with a 50,000-gallon decorative koi pond. “We couldn’t see the fish and the underwater plants were dying,” Bill Bratkoski said.
A week after Friedman began his nontoxic enzyme treatment, the flora and fauna were completely visible. The fish are breeding now, according to the Bratkoskis, who bent my ear with praise for Friedman’s enzymes.
In cases of pools, which are mostly used by humans, the problem is chlorine. Bad stuff, according to declarations last month from the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington--probably destined for banning from many popular products and applications.
Locally, Tim Gayvert of EPIC Services in Moorpark is ahead of the curve. For several years, he has been installing drinking water and pool water conditioning systems--principally involving filtration and reverse-osmosis technology, which leaves the water 95% chlorine-free, he says.
Two local educational-services companies will be represented at ECO EXPO. Midway Productions has produced a line of environmentally themed videos.
Environmentally themed children’s theater productions are staged by Through Children’s Eyes Inc., which will be bringing its star performer, Tammy the Recycling Eagle, to the Convention Center this weekend.
She is fresh from her tour of several Ventura County schools as the lead in “The Mystery of the Missing Trees.” A must-see, like the rest of ECO EXPO this year.
Details
* FYI: For information on ECO-EXPO and the Green Business Conference, call (818) 906-2700.
Local businesses that will be attending ECO-EXPO:
Harmony Works (eco-fashions): 494-5032
Todey Chevrolet (eco-truck): 983-6800
Enviro-Reps International Inc. (biotechnical water treatment): 650-3563
EPIC Services (pool and drinking water conditioning): 529-8255
Midway Productions (eco-videos): 927-8018
Through Children’s Eyes Inc. (eco-education): 373-6200
