The folks over at Recycline scored a pretty sweet movie cameo for their Preserve Toothbrush in the new Will Ferrell film, Stranger than Fiction. The Preserve is made from at least 65% post-consumer recycled polypropylene, from Stonyfield Farms yogurt containers (Danon now owns ~85% of Stonyfield). The crazy thing is that, from what I can gather, the Stonyfield-origin plastic is acquired via consumers who wash and mail back clean containers at their own expense to Stonyfield. In terms of end-of-life for the toothbrush, Recycline offers pre-paid mailers to send back the toothbrushes to then be downcycled into plastic lumber.

Ferrell, arguably a green superstar (drives an electric Toyota Rav4, supports the NRDC, and his G.W. Bush bit in Earth to America!) seems to have made a small statement by getting this green product prominently placed in the movie trailer, leveraging what can only be estimated to be an enormous marketing budget of millions. Advertising that Recycline could have never managed to purchase… but that begs the question, will people make the connection?

In an interesting correlation, the other day, while walking up Market St. in San Francisco, I happened to come across a ragged and discarded Recycline Preserve Toothbrush. This got me wondering “just how many toothbrushes get sent back” and “is that a good model for EPR (extended producer responsibility)”?

In the past, I had purchased and tried using a Preserve toothbrush. I have to admit, I wasn’t terribly thrilled by the user experience (the head is actually angled away from the front, the reverse of the “reach” design) and my toothbrush didn’t come with a mailer. After frustration, I finally found out how you can send it back… To get your pre-paid return mailer, visit this page and fill out a request in the form.

Apparently, it’s still not easy being green …but it’s a step in the right direction and there are lots of people working on it…

See the movie trailer on Sony’s site (extra promotional content, interviews), Apple Trailers, or YouTube.

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See Also: Self-Made Toothbrush Case,Pom Reuse Wonderful,Vestal One Week Film Project: Results,

This entry was posted by Mike Lin on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 9:11 am and is filed under Design, Environment, Social Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.