Last week New Ventures Competition alumni GR GREEN won the Green Building category and a $10,000 cash prize at the Cleantech Open.
Burnaby-based GR GREEN are the developers and manufacturers of the first truly “manufactured green” synthetic roofing products in North America.
GR Green won the $20,000 British Columbia Innovation Council Economic Impact award in the 2009 competition.
“We are honored to receive the Cleantech ‘Oscar’ for the National Green Building Category,” said Geoff Wensel, president of GR GREEN. “This is a fantastic recognition of all our efforts to change the manufacturing paradigm to ‘Cradle to Cradle’. We learned so much during the process and made 10 times more contacts in 3 months than we had in the previous 2 years. We highly recommend the Cleantech Open to any entrepreneur who is working towards environmental sustainability.” 80 percent of all world plastic still ends up in landfills, incinerated or worse, in the ocean.
GR Green has developed a new patented process to produce roofs from recycled plastic and limestone. Every GR Green Slate or Cedar roof uses 44,000 plastic bags, 4,000 milk bottles and waste limestone to make a roof that lasts 50+ years, costs less than cedar and 1/3 of real slate and is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.These roofing products are also cheaper and perform better than all other synthetic products on the market.
The Cleantech Open is the world’s largest cleantech accelerator, a nonprofit organization that fosters the most promising startups in clean-technology fields through a nine-month program that includes education, relationship building and funding opportunities. Last month, three regional finalists including GR GREEN were selected from a talented pool of over 40 innovative cleantech entrepreneur teams from across the Pacific Northwest to represent the region at the 2012 Cleantech Open Global Forum in San Jose.