Incorporating green design principles into new or existing homes is increasingly de rigueur among the growing masses of eco-minded consumers, but figuring out the logistics isn't always straightforward. Working on the belief that green design should be available to all, FreeGreen is a new site that offers free, downloadable green house plans.

Free Green's team of engineers and designers works with industry-leading product manufacturers to create home designs that incorporate different combinations of products, materials and vendors. It also provides 3-D images, energy simulations and written descriptions to help consumers find the right fit for their lifestyle. Two models are currently available on the site, with more coming soon. The first, called the Healthy Family model, combines comfortable contemporary living with superior indoor air quality and low energy bills. With functional options such as mudrooms, homework nooks and home offices, Healthy Family homes are intended for young, three- to five-person families in cold to mixed climates. The modern Suburban Loft, on the other hand, features open floor plans and high ceiling loft spaces. Intended for first-time buyers or downsizing baby boomers, the Suburban Loft plan is designed to perform efficiently even in cold northern climates. Coming soon is the Smart Box, which FreeGreen aims to make a 1,200 to 1,400 sq. ft. home that can be built for less than USD 100 per square foot.

Consumers who download FreeGreen's plans get not just the very detailed plan set, but also an energy report specific to the town or city they select and a welcome packet with additional information, tools and resources. FreeGreen's team can also modify or customize any of its plans. Launched just a few weeks ago, FreeGreen relies on paid placement from product manufacturers, but it takes pains to be transparent about the products it displays, offering users ratings from established third-party green certification programs such as LEED and NAHB and research performance data through its own energy modelling reports.

With the clean, eco-friendly look of FreeGreen's designs, there's no doubt they'll fit nicely into what our sister site trendwatching.com would call the new, eco-iconic world of consumers eager to flaunt their greenness. Besides the obvious advertising opportunity for green product manufacturers, the next logical step is to focus on implementation. Builders around the globe: Who will be first to align with FreeGreen as your town's local green building expert...?

Website: www.freegreen.com
Contact: info@freegreen.com

Spotted by: Cecilia Biemann

Earlier this year we wrote about Kluster, the crowdsourcing platform designed to help crowds develop new concepts. As proof of its own concept, the Vermont-based site has just launched Knewsroom, a community-directed news publication where readers not only have a voice, but they get paid to use it.

Now in beta, Knewsroom publishes the "Knews” every morning, featuring the previous day’s top stories in politics, business, technology, design, sports and entertainment. Which stories rank as most important is decided by the audience of readers, in Digg-like fashion. Going far beyond Digg, though, Knewsroom rewards contributors with a portion of 20 percent of every dollar it earns in advertising revenue. Members of the Knewsroom community can participate by proposing topics for the next day, submitting syndicated or original stories, and voting on favourites. As with Kluster, active members earn "watts"—the official community currency—for their contributions, and they can invest them to varying degrees in the stories they think have the most merit. Investing watts in topics is like investing in mutual funds on Wall Street, Knewsroom explains, offering a lower risk but lower rate of return; betting on stories, on the other hand, is more like investing in individual stocks, with a higher risk but a higher potential return. Whichever way they choose to invest, readers get rewarded each day at deadline, when Knewsroom runs its matrix algorithm to determine the Top 5 topics and the Top 5 stories in each section. Contributors who bet on a winner get a share of all the watts that were invested in that winner along with a cut of the ad revenue generated that day, which gets credited to their Knewsroom MasterCard. Contributors of original content can earn an extra USD 150 for their submissions as well.

There seems to be no doubt that citizen journalism is here to stay, but how it will reshape the news landscape is still being decided. Between Digg, Reddit, Newsvine and others, the race is on to decide what tomorrow's newspaper will look like. Will Knewsroom take hold? Only time will tell. In the meantime, one to test out!

Website: www.kluster.com
Contact: team@kluster.com

Spotted by: Bjarke Svendsen

Recycling advertising banners to make shopping bags isn't new, as Swiss Freitag and UK-based Banner Bags—among others—have been doing for some time. What's interesting about a new effort from Vancouver's Commercial Drive Business Society, however, is that the district's advertisers themselves are the ones doing the recycling.

Each year the Commercial Drive Business Society prints nearly 400 32" x 60" nylon street banners to decorate its shopping neighbourhood. Rather than retiring the banners at the end of their season—and sending them to landfills—the group has begun turning them into reusable nylon shopping bags instead. Available in 10 different colours, the long-handled bags are available in 2 sizes—priced at CDN 9.95 and CDN 14.95, respectively. Remanufacturing is done by Dream Designs, a housewares and clothing manufacturer that originated on Commercial Drive.

By recycling its banners into bags, the society figures it has avoided 7,059 pounds, or 3.53 tons, of CO2 emissions; kept 128 kg (281.6 lb) of nylon out of landfills; saved 25,456,640 BTUs of energy—enough to provide electricity to an average Vancouver home for over 10 months; and freed up 543 trees to capture and store CO2 from other sources for a full year. In addition, proceeds from the bags go toward the development of new green spaces in the neighbourhood. Perhaps best of all, though, is that the goodwill from all this goes straight back to the advertisers themselves. A win-win for everyone involved, and one to emulate in commercial districts around the world!

Website: www.thedrive.ca/bags.shtm
Contact: info@thedrive.ca

Spotted by: Penny Watson

P.S. Need more inspiration and examples of the new trends in green business? Check out trendwatching.com's current briefing on eco-iconic, eco-embedded and eco-boosters.

Plenty of companies sell log cabin kits. But Argos seems to be the first major retailer to market an attractive and affordable model that reportedly can be built in two days by just two people. The British retailer's basic five-room cabin, measuring roughly 32x17 feet or 8x5 meters, costs GBP 10,999. An upgraded model, with amenities such as laminate floors with in-floor heating, costs GBP 13,099. Both models are suitable for year-round living and are made by Finnish forestry company Finnforest using wood from sustainable forests.

Argos' cabins open up several new-business opportunities. For starters, there's likely a much larger market for ready-to-move-in cabins than for cabins that must first be put together, however easy their assembly might be. Thus, one option would be to buy the kits, assemble them and then resell the homes. The cabins' low price coupled with their short assembly time would make the potential profit margin a lot greater than would be the case with conventionally built homes that require weeks to build. And the second opportunity: buy a dozen or so cabins and create a turnkey resort. That's what another low-cost home manufacturer Bamboo Living suggests. The Hawaii-based company's kit homes are manufactured in Vietnam out of fast-growing eco-friendly bamboo and shipped worldwide. Bamboo Living has already spearheaded resorts in Bali, Belize, the Cook Islands, Hawaii and Vietnam. (IKEA's fast-selling BoKlok prefabs, on the other hand, aren't DIY—the homes are assembled by local builders.)

Two things to remember before launching into any venture involving prefab dwellings. First, check local building codes carefully, as kit homes employ non-traditional construction methods. Likewise, be sure to factor in the kinds of costs associated with any building project, such as site surveys, utility hook-ups and permitting.

Website: www.argos.co.uk
Contact: www.argos.co.uk/static/StaticDisplay/includeName/ContactUs.htm

Spotted by: Maria Dahl Jørgensen

Anyone who's ever tried to lose weight or improve their fitness knows that it can sometimes be tough to get motivated. For those who need a little extra help getting going, a new service called WeightNags will nag customers mercilessly until they get off the couch and get some exercise.

WeightNags, which was just launched by Texas-based ConnectWorks Media, needs nothing more than a customer's email address to get started. In exchange, it will hound that customer once a week for free in the hopes of motivating him or her to exercise and lose some weight. Of course, we all know that emails can easily be ignored and deleted in the blink of an eye. Customers who don't trust themselves to take WeightNag's emails seriously can also request weekly nags by phone. All they need to provide is their phone number and first name; the cost is USD 4.95 per month.

Without a way to tell WeightNags when you do get some exercise in or have resisted every single calorie-laden temptation—and thereby win a respite from the nagging—it seems to us the effectiveness of the negative feedback could soon wear off. Nevertheless, it's an interesting concept that could be a nice micro-business opportunity for anyone with a Skype account and a talent for nagging. ;-) (Related: Sell what you say.)

Website: www.weightnags.com
Contact: tgraysonboyd@sbcglobal.net