Going green, environmentally and financially

On a trip to Washington this year, Szoradi joined 16 other delegates from the Greater Philadelphia Sustainable Business Network in lobbying members of Congress to include $500 million in the stimulus package for green-jobs training. What was obvious, said Leanne Krueger-Braneky, the network's executive director, is that Szoradi never stops pressing for a more energy-efficient way of life.

"He would walk into the congressional offices and say, 'If you change that light bulb right there, this is how much money you could save,' " Braneky recalled.

Hanley Bodek, a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania's department of city and regional planning, has gotten to know Szoradi the last few years by leading students on tours of Szoradi's house.

"He's advocating a lifestyle that isn't so much frugal as rather smart," Bodek said. "I think Charlie clearly has figured out how to use the capitalistic system to do good while doing well."

For that, Szoradi gets the last laugh. He is fond of noting that when he wrote a master's thesis at Penn in 1993 on eco-humanism "no one cared."

Now his green work is referenced on Google News, and the National Realtors Association is using it as part of its green curriculum for sales agents.

Cisco Systems, supplier of Internet networking equipment, this year selected Szoradi for its "One Million Acts of Green" campaign - a program, said spokesman Marc Musgrove, that is intended to show "the power of the human network."

Contact staff writer Diane Mastrull at 215-854-2466 or dmastrull@phillynews.com.