Greensulate (Ecovative Design)

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2007 - $15,815

Household energy use accounts for one-fifth of the total energy consumed annually in the US. Better insulation would lead to a reduction in energy consumption, but today's most popular forms of insulation have significant drawbacks in the form of health risks, high cost, and large environmental footprints.

This E-Team developed Greensulate, an environmentally friendly home insulation material. Greensulate is a composite board made up of insulating particles suspended in a matrix of mycelium-growth-stage mushroom cells. This mushroom-based insulation is biodegradable, low cost, produces no pollution in the manufacturing process, and insulates as well as competing products.

They've since focused on developing and selling Ecocradle, a green alternative to polystyrene/Styrofoam packaging.

Update: the team is now incorporated as Ecovative Design. The company won 500,000 euros at Picnic Green Challenge 2008, the world's premier green ideas conference, in Amsterdam, received SBIR Phase I funding from the EPA, and won the DoE's Renewable Energy Laboratory's Clean Energy Venture Awards. Click here to visit their website.

• Blogged on the New York Times (2009)
• Popular Science top-10 invention of the year (2009)
• Planet Green.com (2009)
• CNN's young people who rock
  
• NPR: cool inventions of the year (2009)
• Time magazine - Industrial strength mushrooms (2010)
• Fast Company - Steelcase adopts the Ecocradle packaging system (2010)
• TED - Eben describes the Ecocradle packaging system (2010)
• Huffington Post story and PBS video (2011)
• Ecovative partners with Ford to make car components (April 2011)
• Ecovative Design receives equity funding (May 2011)
• Ecovative partners with Sealed Air Corporation (January 2012)