Streets Paved with Green

Taking the show on the road this spring, the Earthsense Green Team has been part of the eco-conference scene. Our greatest take away is that the streets are, in fact, paved with green. Innovation with an eye towards a sustainable future is crossing all industries, and we’d like to tell you about several of the products and people we found especially promising:

1. Lifestraw - Fifty-year-old Swiss firm Vestergaard Frandsen, which specializes in disease control products, created Lifestraw for developing countries where safe water is scarce.
   
   Presented at the Sustainable Brands conference, Lifestraw is powered by sucking (no electricity or batteries) to create 99.9% purified water, instantly, screening out disease-causing microbes. For a humorous take on its serious purpose, check out uncultured.com’s video on YouTube, “Cow Sh*t to Clean Water.”
   
   
2. Re-source™ Natural Spring Water - Produced by Nestle Waters, and also seen at Sustainable Brands, bottles are made from 25% recycled plastic (the current rate of recycling) with a goal of 100%. Progress toward the goal will be made through messaging on bottles, and on their website re-sourcespringwater.com. With 61% of U.S. adults buying bottled water, according to the Eco-Insights survey, this product is often vilified as part of the problem. Here it’s educating consumers to become part of the solution.
   
   Re-source puts Bill McDonough’s cradle-to-cradle concept into consumers’ hands, making palpable the meaning behind his “waste equals food” mantra. Re-source showcases the power of collaboration and innovation: McDonough’s firm provided design principles and awarded the product its cradle-to-cradle Silver certification; Whole Foods has an exclusive (for now) and is piloting it with full rollout expected this summer; Waste Management’s Greenops has created in-store recycling tracking stations with Think Green Rewards as incentives for recycling, along with the ability to track how recycled containers become “food” for new products.
   
   
3. EarthAid.net - Like Greenops’ Think Green Rewards, Earth Aid Enterprises gives consumers incentives to reduce energy and water consumption by paying them to save energy. A double win. A free service for consumers, Earth Aid captures usage data directly from utilities, then bundles validated consumer savings which they sell on the carbon credit market.
   
   This is a unique value proposition: real data on usage, tools to help manage consumption, recommended energy- and water-saving product catalog and carbon offsets that return value through consumer incentives. The brainchild of entrepreneurs Ben Bixby and Greg O’Keeffe, earthaid.net won the New Venture Judge’s Choice Award.
   
   
4. Us - the Earthsense Green Team! We showcased the advantages of adding location intelligence (LI) to syndicated research at Insights ’09, the Pitney Bowes Business Intelligence conference.
   
   Earthsense shared how PSYTE neighborhood segmentation is used with the Pitney Bowes Anysite analytical tool to locate the best prospects for products and to prioritize markets by pinpointing areas with high concentrations of people who think and buy green. As this map of San Francisco shows, even the #1 green city among the top 10 largest cities has differing levels of concentrations of “Green Core” consumers.
   
   
   
   
5. University student winners of the Greener By Design 2009/Steelcase Sustainable Design Contest were selected based on originality and creativity, use of core sustainability principles and clear social value:
   • Dave Berger (Cooper Union) - Solar Lights, an affordable solar-powered lighting system for millions of people in remote regions of the world, most notably Africa.
   • John Dreher and Mike Norelli (MIT) - MC Shared, a human-centered energy monitoring system that helps Americans to be more energy efficient in their homes.
   • Edgar Rudberg (University of Minnesota) - Community Cactum Rainwater Collection System, a kit that helps water-deprived communities collect and store rainwater.

What have you seen lately that’s making you excited about going green? Let us know!