Sustainable Brands Innovation Open Finalists

Earlier this year Sustainable Life Media (SLM) announced the top 11 finalists for Sustainable Brands Innovation Open (SB’IO). On Monday June 7, 2010, these brands will began presenting their products and services in a bid to impress the SB’IO judges. There are many well known companies associated with SB’IO, here is a review of the 11 new innovative sustainable brand finalists for 2010:

BioLite is an affordable, ultra low emission, wood burning cook stove for the 3 billion people that cook on wood. The BioLite stove features patent-pending technology to harness the fire’s own waste heat to drive the stove’s efficient process. The result is a product that cuts wood consumption in half, reduces toxic smoke emissions by 95% and nearly eliminates black carbon, a potent climate warmer.

Blue Avocado™ is a mission-driven, lifestyle products company that makes it EASY to DO GOOD and GET IT DONE™. A women-owned business started in November 2009, Blue Avocado offers lifestyle products that inspire people to easily reduce their environmental impact, look good and have fun doing it. The gro-pak™ reusable shopping system (which helps to eliminate 1,000 plastic bags annually), Lunch Tote, and Big Chil are just a few members of the Blue Avocado family of reusable and collapsible products that deliver value, avoid waste and invite people to take the first step on the green journey.

Cityscape Farms creates urban greenhouse systems for year round productions of sustainable and local fresh food. Using underutilized parts of the urban landscape such as vacant lots and rooftops, Cityscape Farms aims to transform cities into net food producers instead of merely consumers. The farming is aquaponics, a closed loop system that combines aquaculture (fish cultivation) and hydroponics (soilless farming) whereby filtered fish effluent becomes nutrient feed for crops. It’s efficient, scalable and well-suited for urban applications, does not rely on petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides and is eligible for USDA organic certification.

The Clarity Project is a fine jewelry social enterprise committed to improving the quality of life for miners and their families. They source only fair diamonds, gems and precious metals, and invest all of their net profits back into mining communities.

KOR is creating sustainable hydration with thoughtfully-designed hydration products that deliver a stylish, healthy and rewarding consumer experience. KOR’s mission is to celebrate and protect water. Leveraging reusable bottles, filtered water solutions, and portable water enhancements, KOR products bridge the gaping divide between the traditional reusable market and the latent market of consumers simply waiting to find a better alternative to the $50 billion global bottled water market.

Myoo Create is a new crowdsourcing community, generating innovative ideas and solutions to social and environmental problems through prize driven challenges. The custom-designed competitions are an effective way for organizations to engage with customers and the wider community to help build their sustainability story and brand reputation.

Open Data Registry’s patent-pending Internet Product Code (IPC) is a specialized unique identifier (URI) embedded with environmental and product life cycle semantics. It innovates upon UPC / EPC in two key ways: (1) Defining a product’s identity based upon how it was made, rather than who made it; (2) Storing that identity on the Web, rather than in a restricted-access database, such that anyone in the world may freely link any data to or look up any other data across the Web linked to that IPC.

Source4Style makes sustainable design possible by creating the world’s most innovative online marketing platform for designers and suppliers to showcase, connect and transact. Source4Style is poised to become the definitive B2B portal for sustainable design, offering interactive tools that decrease the barriers to ethical global sourcing. Robust search capabilities, interactivesourcing maps, online negotiation tools and breadth of trusted content on environmentally-friendly and fair trade materials will make sustainable design the norm.

Tremont Electric develops and commercializes renewable power generation solutions based on its patented nPower® energy conversion technology. The nPower® intellectual property is centered exclusively on the interaction between electromagnetic fields and the physical world. The initial product, the nPower® PEG, is a $149 wearable generator that recharges cell phones, Mp3 players, cameras and GPS devices by harvesting the kinetic energy generated by human motion, through activities like walking, jogging or riding a bike.

TrueVue Solutions is a software and information company that helps customers discover and quantify the financial risk attached to current environmental and social factors, providing SDR data and access to benchmarking data from hundreds of indicators across 100 industries to help customers understand how they rank within their industry.

ZippGo rents and delivers a zero waste moving box solution to residential and office clients. Sustainable pack and move solution consists of reusable moving boxes made from 100% recycled plastic, a custom-made reusable and recyclable moving dolly, and sustainable packing supplies made from recycled post consumer paper. ZippGo delivers the boxes to the client on biodiesel powered delivery trucks, the client packs and moves their belonging, and ZippGo picks up the boxes from the client’s new location at their convenience. ZippGo boxes come pre-assembled (no tape required) with attached lids, have handles for carrying, are crush proof, tear proof, and water proof.