According to the EPA, small business employs more than half of all U.S. workers and is responsible for the majority of new eco-friendly technologies developed in the country. That may explain why the EPA has become a quasi venture capitalist firm in recent years providing funding to the best eco-friendly innovations emerging from small businesses. As reported in a recent GreenBiz article, the EPA will award $1.75 million to 25 small business on the forefront of eco-friendly technologies.

According to George Gray, EPA assistant administrator for the Office of Research and Development; “There are huge new opportunities for profits in the booming green technology business sector.”

The Small Business Innovation Research program is designed to support the development of nanotechnology, pollution prevention, biodiesels, solid and hazardous waste, air pollution control and homeland security, in particular.

One previous winner, Edenspace Systems, produced a plant that could remove arsenic from the soil and was used by the Army to clean parts of Spring Valley, Washington D.C. This year’s winners will receive an initial $70,000 to produce a proof of their concept and then they may apply for a second phase to begin commercializing the product. The EPA is accepting submissions for next year’s contest until May 21 of 2009.

Every year the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency honors Green Power Partners that commit to buying renewable such as a solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, biogas, and low-impact hydro. Last week the EPA honored 17 companies that buy a combined total of almost 4 billion kilowatt hours of green power each year. The Green Power Partners of the year are Whole Foods Market, Wells Fargo and Co., Staples, PepsiCo., Mohawk Fine Paper, Johnson and Johnson, and the City of Bellingham, WA.

Other winners;

Timberland Co., Macy’s West Division, and the City of Chico, CA all won for on-site generation. Kohl’s, PepsiAmericas Inc., Pepsi Bottling Group Inc., Pepsi Bottling Ventures, New York

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LEED in China?

GreenBiz is the source for this very cool article about a green building initiative in China - yes, China.

“Under a program called the Urban Sustainability Initiative, U.C. Berkeley has been working in China, researching technologies and design of sustainable communities to make the EcoBlock a reality, first as a portotype, but soon to spread across China. A hugely collaborative effort involving an interdisciplinary team put together by the College of Environmental Design at Berkeley, the Tianjin Urban Planning and Design Institute and the Gordon Moore Foundation, the team has been working to integrate the best of clean technologies into the decision-making processes of urban areas throughout the developing world. In 2006, U.C. representatives met with officials from central and local governments in China to identify a site suitable for development of an EcoBlock prototype and settled on Qingdao, a 600-unit building that will be replicated eight and a half times across 23 hectare (56 acre) plot of land.”

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