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"We're bringing together the best and the brightest designers to talk about environmental sustainability, making products that last longer, that are recyclable, that use less energy," explains Parker Brugge of the Consumer Electronics Association.

One part of how that will happen seems universally agreed upon – by making both the products and their packaging out of greener materials, from bio-based plastics to Sheep Poo paper.

"There are a couple issues," says Matt Grisby of Ecolect.net. "One issue is designing it in a way that could be easily recycled or using less material, another issue is the toxicity of the product, another issue is a buyback program, thinking about ways to reclaim the materials."

Many manufacturers at the conference said they hope their efforts will help large-scale manufacturers get more creative.

One young designer is using cardboard to create a fully-functional computer. Called "Recompute," the electronic guts are traditional computer parts, but Brenden Macaluso says it's his goal to replace everything other than those core parts with greener material.

"The computer itself is made of two sheets of cardboard, 4 feet by 10 feet, so not much more than a refrigerator box of cardboard, six ounces of white glue, and some printing paper," says Macaluso, who is working on the project as his senior thesis at the University of Houston.

Macaluso's "Recompute" was one of the very few entrants in the Greener Gadget Design Competition that was made into a prototype. Other designs included a printer that uses used coffee grinds as ink and a manually-powered washing machine.

The winner of the design contest was Tweet-a-Watt, a box designed to cut down on power consumption through peer pressure. The box announces via Twitter how much energy you're using every single day.