Bethel Native’s Firm Wins 500K Euro Award

Bethel Native’s Firm Wins 500K Euro Award By Martha Slater  

 

 

Ecovative Design LLC (yes, that’s the right spelling!), a company founded by Eben Bayer, a 2003 graduate of South Royalton High School, and his business partner, Gavin McIntyre, was recently the winner of the 500,000-euro top prize given by the PICNIC Green Challenge.

Based in Holland, the Challenge is an international competition that urges people to send in creative and innovative ideas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Bayer’s company produces an environmentally friendly organic insulation, which he calls Greensulate. A patented combination of water, flour, minerals, and mushroom spores that is dried and molded into panels, it could replace conventional foam insulation, which is expensive to synthesize and harmful to the environment, the company says.

"We discovered the contest over the Internet and entered in July," Bayer told The Herald, "and we got a call back in August that we were going to Amsterdam.

"There were only four teams selected to participate out of 250 entries. Our entry was all about Greensulate and our technology and our vision for transforming the way the world makes materials."

Founded just a year and a half ago in Troy, N.Y., the company got a quarter million dollar grant this year from New York State to do development and has three full-time and six part-time employees.

"We’re still testing and developing our insulation and we’re looking for partners to work with us on our packaging material, which will be available sooner," Bayer said. He noted that the prize money, which is equal to about $700,000, will be used "to accelerate and execute our growth plan and bring in more people.

"We’re building a prototype manufacturing system right now," he said.

Bayer said the four international finalists arrived in Amsterdam on a Monday and had three days to settle in while the PICNIC conference was going on.

"On presentation day, Thursday, everyone gave a 10-minute presentation," Bayer recalled. "Prior to that, we had each distributed 30 to 40 pages of documentation. We took five minutes of questions from the audience and then had a nerve-wracking five or six hours while we waited—and then my name was called—it was pretty exciting!"

Eben’s father Todd and girlfriend Nicole had traveled to Amsterdam with him and were there to help him celebrate his accomplishment.

This is not the first international competition Bayer has won. Last year, Ecovative Design, LLC received £10,000 (approximately $20,500) as a winner in the 21^st Century Challenge Competition, an international business plan competition hosted by Oxford University’s Saïd Business School.