Courtesy of Benjamin Goldfarb
DCL
Benjamin Goldfarb, formerly Nestle's interactive marketing guru, has been hard at work gathering content for and promoting AltUse.com, a new website that seeks to find alternative uses for any and all items that might be lying around the house—both saving people money and slowing the pace at which we as a society fill our landfills. He spent some time talking with me recently about this exciting new project.
Planet Green: We have a pretty environmentally minded audience here at Planet Green. Can you talk about the green aspects of AltUse.com? Benjamin Goldfarb: AltUse has grand aspirations: to fundamentally change the manufacturing of products. To enable manufacturers to market alternative uses of their products, and better tap into their consumers because consumers are the big experts on products. Alternative use will become a product differentiation point: companies can tout on packaging that this product has alternative uses, and even the packaging itself—why can't product packaging have alternative uses?
Twenty percent of things people buy is not used, or is used partially and then thrown away. We think we can enable people to get more value out of what they have, solve problems, and embrace green.
We see AltUse becoming part of the vernacular, the way Google has. We want it to become part of the thought process as you're buying things, consuming things: "What's the AltUse?"
PG: Have you been able to quantify how much waste AltUse helps to prevent from going to the landfill? BG: We want to come up with an AltUse calculator—if you're using this product in this way, what does that save—but we haven't yet.
PG: Do you have any favorite AltUses? BG: I have a couple of favorites—I do some gardening at the house, and using dried mashed potato flakes in the garden to get rid of vermin, gophers, squirrels—that's a cute and fun one.
Another one is coffee grounds. There could be ten alternative uses for coffee grounds, from fertilizer in the garden to keeping ants out of the house, but one people have told me about is, if you have a child sniff coffee before a car ride, it saves them from nausea. It's also an odor-eliminator, coffee grounds will absorb odors in the fridge as well.
Vodka is a great way to clean your glasses. Dryer sheets, once they've been used in the dryer, can be used to clean stainless steel appliances.
Another favorite is with whisk brooms. I put a call out to AltUsers to come up with an alternative use for an old broom, and someone suggested to make it into a bird feeder for the garden: when it's worn down to a nub, stick the handle in the ground so it's stable, then put birdseed in the whisks that are worn down and it becomes a really cool birdfeeder. Birds will peck in between the whisks for the food... Instead of throwing it away.
PG: How has the response been so far? BG: We have been approached by companies who believe that tapping into AltUse can increase the utility of their products. A lot of companies are challenged to promote green in their product. Through AltUse, we think it'll help fast-forward companies to embrace it, have dialogue around it, and to really take it seriously.
We officially launched at the end of July, 2009 and we have a few thousand products and AltUses in our database now. We're almost at 1600 followers on Twitter, we have more than 2,000 registered users, and our Facebook group has more than 1,400 fans.
Recycling is important, but AltUse is way beyond recycling. We're catching up to other parts of the world in terms of reusing, and this is a great addition to our culture here.
