Finally, a one-stop-shop for green building materials

If you wanted a resource for green building materials you had more resources than ethnic restaurants in Manhattan. At long last, there’s Ecolect, whose mission is “to be the largest, freely accessible sustainable materials library in the world.”

In 2005, RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) graduates Joe Gebbia and Matt Grigsby felt the same way so many of us do about finding sustainable materials – it’s confusing, uninspiring and sometimes all but impossible. However, being the creatives that they are, they decided to do something about it and created established a service, fronted by a gorgeous website that solved this long-running black hole of service in the marketplace. Ecology stems from the combination of ‘ecology’ and ‘intellect’.

The graphic-oriented site includes user-uploaded pictures of the material in use, user reviews and tagging to help cross-indexing, as well as detailed descriptions and a blog.

Two related qualities of the site that are way too overlooked, but are extremely important components of what makes or breaks a site – it’s easy-to-use and beautiful. It’s no surprise they tapped into their colleagues at RISD when designing the site – see what access to a creative community can do?

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