Well it was a great day, and we’ve seen some really incredible green designs from the INDEX Awards. From the solar-powered streetlights, to the life-saving solar bottle, to the oh-so-sexy Tesla roadster, this year’s awards had many impressive designs, many more than we could show here. Check out all the nominees at http://www.indexaward.dk

Here’s the whole list for reference:

10. Human Powered LED Lamp.

9. Dongtan Eco-City

8. Trackless Sustainable Watershoes

7. Airwash: Waterless Washing Machine

6. BCK Solar Cooker

5. Disease Fighting Solar Bottle

4. Green Home Cleaning Products

3. Solar Powered Streetlights

2. Waterless Urinal

1. Tesla Roadster

That’s all folks! We’ll be doing this for next year’s INDEX Awards as well, I can’t believe it’s only a year away!

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Excuse me while I drool over this eco-wonder…

The Tesla Roadster is an ultra-sexy, ultra-green ELECTRIC car. Yes, this thing is 100% electric. No more golf-carts or toy cars, electric cars have joined the ranks of their gas-guzzling brothers and sisters.

Just take a look at some of these stats:

• 0-60mph in 4 seconds
• An equivalent cost of 135mpg
• Over 200 miles before recharging
• 248hp peak
• Top Speed: Over 130mph
• Battery Lifespan: in excess of 100,000 miles
• Charge Time 3.5 hours

A Peaceful Solution to Oil Wars: You need only open the morning paper to understand the importance — and urgency — of America‘s reduced reliance on foreign oil. The instability of the Middle East makes our 58% dependence on foreign oil a dangerous and costly proposition. Look even closer and you’ll see that the lion’s share of American oil use (nearly two-thirds of our consumption) is tied directly to transportation. The time for a gasoline-free car is now. Electricity may be just one answer, but it’s an especially desirable one. As the universal currency of energy, it can be generated from coal, solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear sources — or a combination of all of them. No matter how or when the world changes, electricity can adapt, easily and safely. See www.teslamotors.com web site for more environmental benefits. The Tesla Roadster is a major breakthrough in the technology, energy efficiency, driving performance and customer appeal of an electric vehicle.

Check out the Tesla Motors website for more information
via INDEX Awards

Continue: View the Whole Top 10 List >>

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Just think of how much water is being wasted just to flush a urinal. You’re getting rid of what is basically water anyway, why use billions of litres of water a year to do it?

This ingenious design, the H2Zero, uses a special cartridge that is less-dense than urine. It thus allows the waste to pass through it, thus getting rid of it and any smell. The most important thing? It uses absolutely no water to do so. This has the potential to save billions of litres of water from being wasted, although it would need a retrofit of the world’s men’s rooms.

Now if we could only get the water-less toilet perfected and in every washroom we’d be set.

The H2Zero™ has the potential to save billions of litres of fresh water in the Australian and global environments. The vitreous china urinal incorporates unique cartridge technology that operates with zero water for optimum performance and water conservation, thus improving life anywhere it is used.

via INDEX Awards

Continue: Number 1: Tesla Roadster >>

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Imagine how many streetlights there are in your city. Now imagine how many there are in your province or state. Now the entire country. Now all of North America. Now the entire world.

That’s a lot of streetlights, and a lot of power. What if all those streetlights could be powered by renewable electricity? Well this design features a solar-powered streetlight. It charges it’s batter during the day, and uses that power at night. It doesn’t specify the type of bulb used, but a super-bright white LED would be great on energy.

These solar-powered streetlights could also produce more than they would use to light the streets, and could theoretically be hooked back into the grid. This would provide a mass solar farm and generating massive amounts of electricity. Who knows, maybe you city will be powered by it’s streetlights in the near future!

By implementation of this system of products which are all street furniture that work and depend on energy collected by themselves, our urban areas could literary become solar energy farms. In this system it is most likely that energy collected in this way will be more than enough for need of street lamps, phone booths, bus stops and all of the leftover energy can be used for other purposes. With its 7.3 square meters of the main panel with solar cells and with MoSESS (Movement sensors energy saving system), big solar street lamp is able to provide illumination for city streets throughout all night. Bus stops provide ideal space for application of solar cells. They do not use much energy and in this way they can help other users from the SOLAR FAMILY that use more electricity. Even more, the electricity collected by the Solar bus stops can be used by any other user as they are all connected to electric company that serve as collecting energy point.

via INDEX Awards

Continue: Number 2: The Water-Saving Urinal  >>

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Cleaning products are ugly. They’re corrosive chemicals that require thick plastic gloves. Well, there is finally an alternative.

The Method Home Series is a full line of cleaning products that are 100% eco-friendly. There are no toxic chemicals, and they are all naturally-derived and fully biodegradable.

The company itself is reducing it’s C02 footprint as well.

Great stuff! Now you can keep toxic chemicals out of your house, and throw away those big plastic gloves too.

Tons and tons of toxic chemicals are used every year to provide for cleaning materials all over the world. Method Home offers a very fab designed line of cleaning materials with no toxic chemicals. Thus providing safety, efficiency and sustainability in an important area. All Method products are naturally-derived, biodegradable, and scented with essential oils such as French lavender, magnolia, and pink grapefruit. On top of the sustainable issues Method due to the stunning packing design by – among others – Karim Rashid also offers an aesthetic value to peoples home in an area where aesthetics are scarce. It works and is needed: Inc. Magazine has added method to the 25th annual Inc. 500 ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the country. method ranks No. 7 on the list, with three-year growth of 3,390.5%. On top of this Method is taking the fight against dirty on in its own backyard by lowering own carbon dioxide (CO2) footprint in a new strategy.

via INDEX Awards

Continue: Number 3: Solar Powered Streetlights >>

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This is a perfect example of how green electricity can help humans as well as the environment.

These solar bottles are filled with water and then exposed to sunlight for 6 hours. The sunlight kills any bacteria, viruses, or other harmful pathogens in the water, making it safe to drink.

This could bring fresh, drinkable water to communities with polluted water sources or who have no drinkable water.

Bottle can improve the life of an enormous quantity of people, by providing them with safe water to drink wherever there is no access to improved water supply. No access to good quality drinking water leads to a high risk of water-borne diseases such as diarrhoea, cholera, typhoid fever, hepatitis A, dysentery and other diseases. One sixth of the world’s population has no access to safe water today. Bottle utilizes a water treatment method named SODIS (Solar Disinfection System) a simple, environmentally sustainable, low-cost solution for drinking water treatment at household level for people consuming microbiologically contaminated raw water. Contaminated water is filled into transparent plastic bottles and exposed to full sunlight for six hours. During the exposure to the sun the pathogens are destroyed. The SODIS system has been used in South America, Africa and the Far East with good results, with the new Bottle design the results and the diffusion of the system can increase.

via INDEX Awards

Continue: Number 4: Green Home Cleaning Products >>

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Remember when you were a kid and you discovered you could burn things with a magnifying glass? Well things have come a long way since burning my name into our back deck.

The sun is a fantastic, and very underused source of heat energy, but get some mirrors or magnifying glasses out and you can cook a meal! The BCK Solar Cooker does just that, it cooks stuff using the heat from the sun.

While it’s a bit hard to tell everyone to get rid of their stoves or microwaves for a concave mirror, it’s a great thing to keep in mind while camping, or to keep for emergencies.

The design of the solar cooker improves the quality of life by allowing the public to cook in a clean and ecological way, without the use of non-renewable sources and without aggravating the environment (Green Design). The advantages of this project are that it can be used within natures boundaries where other resources are unavailable and where we must protect the environment and in situations where we wish to experiment in an innovative way of cooking and of working alongside with the nature.

via INDEX Awards

Continue: Number 5: Disease-Fighting Solar Bottle >> 

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This thing really gets me excited about the future. Just look at this thing! Nicely curved and covered in blue lights, simply beautiful.

Even cooler than it’s design is what it does, this washing machine cleans clothes without the use of water & detergent. It uses “negative ions and compressed air”. Well I’m not sure exactly how it works, but it’s cleaning up at the award shows.

Not available for purchase yet as far as I know, but definitely something to keep an eye on!

A waterless washing machine that removes stains from garments within a few minutes, without the use of detergents. The AirWash, which won the ElectroLux Design Lab 2005 Award, uses negative ions, compressed air and deodorants to clean clothes; the form was inspired by the waterfall, which just so happens to be nature’s own negative ion factory. It can be used for cleaning garments of all kinds, though the judges took special note of AirWash’s potential to make convential, eco-superfreaky dry cleaning obsolete. AirWash also stands to help save lots on energy costs and water consumption, and has lots of potential for places without ready access to clean water.

via INDEX Awards via Treehugger

Continue: Number 6: BCK Solar Cooker >>

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These watershoes are oh-so-eco-cool. They are made from 100% naturally renewable, and 100% biodegradable material. They also keep the highly-polluting raw material normally found in watershows out of landfills.

I was surprised at the stats on watershoes though, 30 million of them are made each year, and over 200,000 pairs are discarded. That’s a lot of watershoes!

The plastic normally found in water shoes is pretty bad stuff, so these are a great green option.

TrackLess is not a simple restyling but a completely new vision of a well known object: shoes for the beach and swimming-pool. Life improvement is achieved by completely replacing the highly polluting raw material commonly used at present, with a smart raw material naturally renewable, without any ecological drawback, and 100% biodegradable. To get an idea of the impact of this innovation, consider that 30 million pairs of this kind of shoe are manufactured in Italy each year, and each week 200 thousand are discarded adding tons of polluting plastic to the environment. There is also a potential source of improvement for economically underdeveloped people living in tropical areas where the plant that produces the raw material grows: the manufacturing process is designed for small industries, with low cost and fast production time; this makes it suitable for small farms, assuring the farmer another source of income from the production of the plant which is the raw material for this item

via INDEX awards

Continue: Number 7: AirWash: Waterless Washing Machine >>

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There have been some incredible improvements in eco-technology over the past couple year, but eventually we’re going to have to think about how to re-design our cities to make full use of them.

The Dongtan Eco-City maybe be something to look at. It’s a community designed to have minimal impact and promote eco-living. The city will be designed to promote walking, biking or taking public transportation. Farms will be organic. As for waste, it’s used as a eco-friendly biofuel.

The city will demonstrate to the world a new way of living, a new approach to designing urban environments and a way of building communities that minimises impact on the environment. Arup secured a £1.5m UK Government grant to unite China and UK research institutions in identifying and sharing best practice. Inhabitants will live an improved lifestyle. The location of land uses, transport planning and public space design encourage the use of public transport, cycling and walking. Dongtan will be a Zero Carbon Emission zone. Farmland within the Dongtan site will use organic farming methods to grow food. Waste is a resource and will be recycled as biomass for energy production. Energy will be provided almost entirely by renewable means. Dongtan is designed to reduce the environmental impact of a ‘business as usual’ city, so that the Ramsar bird habitat, located on the south-eastern side of Chongming Island, is protected and enhanced.

via INDEX Awards

Continue: Number 8: Trackless Sustainable Watershoes >>

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