30 Sep Reporting from Picnic ’08 in Amsterdam – The winners of this year’s GREEN CHALLENGE
By Doris Obermair
Images by Silvia Langa
The Green Challenge award for the most innovative and promising sustainable business idea is already a fundamental part of the Picnic festival. Every year, an international jury of sustainable experts and business people select the best greenhouse-gas-reducing product or service and the Dutch Postcode Lottery gives away 500,000 Euros to support the further development of that project. The four final nominees were pre-selected from a total of 235 entrees. During the award ceremony environmental expert and jury member Nicky Gavron mentioned the main criteria for selecting the finalist projects. First, the idea has to be disruptive, leap-frogging and creative and second there has to be a passionate, high-calibre team behind it for which half a million Euro makes a real difference in order to push the idea further and bring it to the market. 4 ideas made it to the final:
1) Route-RANK by the Swiss inventor Jochen Mundinger who developed an online application that calculates your carbon footprint and finally proposes the ecologically friendliest option to travel between 2 points. It gives consumers an independent tool to make an informed choice about the use of different means of transport and their impact on the environment.
2) Greensulate™ developed by the US company Ecovative Design. Greensulate™ is a revolutionary eco-friendly construction material to be used in structural insulation panels and is made from agricultural bi-products like buckwheat for example which is then combined with cellulose from fungi and transformed into a strong organic material.
3) SmartScreen, an intelligent shading system for windows and glass façades was presented by Peter Yeadon Decker and Yeadon, New York. Their invention is a solution to problems of energy conservation in cities. And no. 4 were Capra J’Neva and Emilie Fetscher from Veranda Solar who presented their small, affordable solar panels targeted to a mass market. The panels can be placed on balconies, gutters and windows and produce personal green energy without investing in big, space-consuming roof-top panels.
The jury members assured that the decision was hard to take and so they spontaneously came up with a price for the second best idea worth 100,000 Euros and went to Veranda Solar. But the really big one of 500,000 Euros went to Eben Bayer and his team at Ecovative Design for their product Greensulate™, a healthy, affordable and effective replacement for expanded polystyrene (styrofoam), a petroleum-based material that is used mainly in construction but also in packaging and has negative impacts on the environment because the majority of polystyrene products are not recycled because of a lack of suitable recycling facilities.
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