Sustainability got sexier last week as Coldcut and Jade Jagger hosted the opening of Surya in King’s Cross. The Club4Climate project is London’s first taste of eco-friendly clubbing, making clubbers happy in the knowledge that their organic beverage-induced booty shaking can generate 60% of the energy needed to run the club. The venue’s most exciting innovation is the piezoelectric dancefloor, which uses quartz crystals and ceramics to turn clubbers’ movement into electricity!

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Here at Inhabitat, we’re well aware that any product that seems green needs investigation and consideration before undertaking any celebration. Graduating design student Nick Bampton joins us in this approach, encouraging others to do the same with his graduation project, entitled ‘Subverting the Green Aesthetic’. The Middlesex student has produced three pairs of products and easy-to-understand graphics to get people thinking further than the green first impressions.

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Bored of the same old tourist routes around London? Insider London, the brainchild of Inhabitat’s own Cate Trotter, has been set up to show you all the pioneering, green-design goings-on in the city. The Cutting-Edge Green Tour is the first of the business’s range of innovative tours, taking in sexy products, gorgeous shops, futuristic architecture and inspiring communities.

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Alon Alex Gross’s fog and dew collectors provide a low-tech way for people in arid, developing regions to collect drinking water. Gross uses design to show users how individuals can come up with their own answers to ecological and technical problems. His method fuses the ancient methods of fog harvesting and dew collection with modern improvements such as super light materials and internet connectivity.

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The OSP robot is an ingenious solution to something that has devastling effects on wildlife and the environment: oil spills. The faster a spill can be dealt with – the better the outcome. With this in mind, product designer Ji-hoon Kim has come up with a set of modular oil-cleaning robots that can be quickly transported to the scene of an oil spill by helicopter or boat. Once deployed, the little oil-busting robots connect and contain the spill with an inflatable barrier, after which point cleanup teams can come in and manage a less severe disaster.

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This bizarrely named but beautiful Cinelli Bootleg Magic Bus Rat bike was one of the many highlights of this year’s Well-Tech Awards at Milan Design Week 2008. Folding up in 20 seconds and weighing less than the average trekking bike at 11kg, this little cycle offers a particularly nimble, stylish way to get around town. With a totally sustainable street attitude, high-tech attributes and miles of bike experience behind it from one of cycling’s top stars, the Bus Rat is a tricked out two wheeler we can’t ignore.

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Next year, eco-luxe travel will get a new destination with the opening of a new five-star resort for Star Island in the Bahamas. In and among diving, playing tennis and drinking a cocktail or two, holidaymakers will discover that the resort is entirely energy self-sufficient, with power coming from solar, wind and micro-hydro generators. And, that the sustainability aspects of the resort’s construction, interior and grounds have also been considered in impressive detail.

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It’s not all doom and gloom for the UK property market: in the face of the country’s slowing or depreciating prices, Sarah Featherstone’s cutting-edge green home has sold for a record-breaking £7.2million, or $14.2million USD! The building, known as Orchid House, is one of the key homes on Lower Mill Estate, a project to turn a disused gravel pit into a beautiful 450-acre nature reserve.

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When we made our way through the Tuttobene show at the Milan Furniture Fair this year, we initially thought Manon Juliette’s ‘Feliz’ leather rug was simply a delightfully tactile creation. However, closer inspection revealed that sustainability enters the design story at almost every stage of this charming creation. As well as looking at the ecological impacts, the Dutch designer has incorporated social benefits, considering everyone involved in the lifecycle of these decorative pieces.

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Being the Dutch design aficionados that we are, we don’t think we’ll ever get tired of playful Dutch design, especially when it’s as sustainable and delightful as Krejci’s ‘Let’s Grow Some Balls!’ chair, which is both a planter and chair all in one. A garden chair that IS the garden, users are brought closer to nature by being surrounded with it.

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Over the years, Milan has evolved from merely hosting a furniture fair every spring to having almost every street taken over by all types of innovative design every April. This year, sustainable design joined in the fray more than ever, with many exciting exhibits highlighting socially conscious design, including the Well-Tech Awards. At this inspirational show we discovered the Lifesaver bottle – a beautifully simple concept for portable water filtration, and one that could make a real difference to a world increasingly threatened by shortages of clean, drinkable water.

We are captivated by the lunar visions created in this glowing ‘Fullmoon’ credenza. Designed by Sotirios Papadopoulos for ENNEZERO, this intriguing piece brings a realistic recreation of the moon’s surface to light with a luminescent paint. Despite looking very chemical-intensive and unsustainable, the glow-in-the-dark paint is actually an ‘ecological powder’ that’s been modified into a substance called ELI, or ‘Ecolightinside.’

Clearly a design better suited to sunny Italy than our native London, Toshiyuki Kita’s Sunplant, which we spotted in Milan this year, is an elaborate outdoor energy installation that fuses art with environmentally friendly gadget power. It’s a lovely metaphor: energy from the sun hits one of the plant’s eight PV panel ‘leaves’, which is then used to recharge up to 48 AA batteries that sit at the installation’s centre.

Herman Miller, the company behind the famous Aeron cradle-to-cradle chair, has just won another point for sexy sustainability by offering new takes on eight furniture design classics in eco-friendly fabric. The new Herman Miller Environment collection includes the Eames Aluminum Group Lounge Chair, the Executive chair and the Compact sofa. The selected eco-revamped designs will be stocked exclusively by ABC Home, which chose the range for its ability to integrate today’s sustainability agenda into designs with timeless beauty.

Added to an end-of-terrace house in North London, Focus House is a delightful prefabricated eco-home for a family of five. Bere Architects, the firm behind the design, used PassivHaus principles to inform their process. The world’s leading energy efficiency standard, Passivhaus recognizes buildings that are so energy efficient all they need is a small electric heater. Focus House is a unique design that embodies the prefab principles of waste reduction and efficiency, and raises the bar on energy-efficient building design.

Eco-friendly lightbulbs are an energy efficient step in the right direction, but it could be that the bulb’s days are numbered. First we had light-emitting wallpaper, and now Saazs’ light-emitting glass plates. Using planilum technology, these plates are the world’s first active light-emitting glass. Incorporated into shelves and tables, the technology provides beautiful, understated lighting for homes and offices.

One of the subtler but more beautiful designs that we saw at the Milan 2008 Greenenergy Design show was Antonio Citterio’s ‘Lace’: tiled architectural cladding that’s designed for user wellbeing and ecological preservation. A standardised product that produces an intricate and intriguing pattern when multiplied, the design keeps the user in touch the world outside. The tiles themselves were also more sustainable, using a special resin that is free of solvents and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

With a name like ‘No More Gas’, you can bet that this cute little personal electric vehicle is as good to the environment as it is to the user. Its size, weight and fuel make it much better for the planet, while its look and driving experience make it great fun for the driver. Looking like it’s dropped straight out of an episode of The Jetsons, this tiny car can achieve speeds of over 75mph for a cost of $0.02 per mile. All this eco-goodness earned Myers Motors’ NmG vehicle kudos at this year’s Well-Tech Awards exhibit in Milan.

We never thought the Frankenstein approach would work for eco-design, but Dutch designer Jetske de Groot shows that it works beautifully. A refreshing change to all the super-slick design at the Milan Furniture Fair, de Groot’s chairs and tables are as sustainable as they are appealing. The project, entitled ‘Multiple Family’, is driven by a brilliant, simple approach: take two or more broken chairs or tables, and fuse the non-broken bits together to produce a new, functional and completely unique design.

We’ve covered many of our favorite designs from Milan Design Week 2008 this past week, but there was lots of intriguing eco design that we still haven’t touched on yet: Steven Burks’ eco-minded ‘Cappellini Love’ tables, lots of LED oriented lighting, waste-diverting floor coverings made from scrap materials, and innovations for portable functional spaces are just a few of the highlights we don’t want to leave out from our Milan Coverage. From Tuttobene, Satellite and around town, here is a selection of great green designs we spotted while out and about in Milan last week.