PHOENIX, AZ — Editor's note: To read all our coverage of Greenbuild 2009, visit GreenerBuildings.com/Greenbuild2009.

Convention-goers streamed onto the vast tradeshow floor of the Phoenix Convention Center Tuesday evening as Greenbuild 2009 opened the doors to the expo portion of the U.S. Green Building Council's eighth annual conference.

The venue for the expo is the largest by far for Greenbuild. More than 1,800 exhibitors signed up to display their products and services. 

Yet even before vendors had settled into their booths, some were already looking toward Greenbuild 2010 in Chicago. Attendance projections for this year and anticipated demand for tradeshow booths next year, prompted conference organizers to urge exhibitors to commit to space early. 

"It wasn't even 3:30 [Tuesday afternoon] when we heard that they're saying there are about 24,000 pre-registered [attendees] for the conference this year and that we have to look ahead to Chicago now," said one exhibitor.

Official Greenbuild attendance for this year will be tallied later. For now, conference organizers say 24,000 is a preliminary working figure and they expect it to increase with walk-in registration throughout the week.

Exhibitors are hoping those numbers will translate into business and Tuesday night they were focused on sharing the sustainability messages of their companies with all comers.

Here is a sampling of some of the firms that chatted with GreenerBuildings.com:

Sunoptics

Business is going so well for Sunoptics, maker of prismatic skylights for high-performance daylighting systems, that the 31-year-old firm based in Sacramento, California, is expanding its operations, says Grant Grable, the company's vice president for sales and marketing.

Launched with just three employees in 1978 working out of a 6,000-square-foot site, the privately owned company now employs about 80 at its 120,000-square-foot operation, where all manufacturing is done in house -- a point of pride for the firm. The product is 100-percent made in the U.S. An average of 6,000 units a month are produced by the company, whose goal is to get retailers, manufacturers and others businesses to switch off the lights and let the sun -- with the help of their product -- do its work.

"There's no greater efficiency than 'off,'" Grable likes to say. The company's prismatic skylights are the "most cost-effective and efficient green technology on the market," he says

From Sunoptics' viewpoint, daylighting ought to be first solar option that building owners and developers consider. Some major firms have bought into that principle. The company's clients include Walmart, which has used the skylights in its stores and in Sam's Club for about 17 years, Grable says; Coca-Cola as well as Coca-Cola Enterprises, the beverage company's bottler and distributor; Best Buy and Lowe's, among others.

In addition to the U.S., the firm now also does business in Mexico, Central and South America, England, Spain, Portugal, France, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

In honor of men and women who have served in the U.S. military, Sunoptics has given some of its booth space at Greenbuild to the local VFW post so the group can raise funds. That effort starts today, Veterans Day, and will last through the expo, which closes Thursday night.

Quality Attributes Software

Over in the large circular space occupied by Quality Attributes Software, John Grabowski shows what his company can do to help firms understand the wealth of data that pours in from their building systems by organizing it and the analyses that flow from the information and by providing visual images to convey that information. 

In addition to helping businesses better manage their use of resources, that environmental impact and the related costs, the company's goal is to help firms tell the story of those sustainability efforts to a range of external and internal audiences: They can include building occupants and visitors, shareholders, the general public of the company's CFO. 

Quality Attributes' product, iBPortal (the iB stands for intelligent building), is web-enabled kiosk software with modules that provides a colorful, interactive and real-time way to communicate the information. "It's like Xbox meets engineering," says Grabowski, the company's chief sales and marketing officer.