Get ready for eco-friendly everything. As we race into the future companies will all be trying to “out-eco†each other in this lucrative market. Joe Gardener.com has awarded Scott’s/Miracle-Gro’s Deluxeâ„¢ EdgeGuard® Broadcast Spreader its “Best of the must haves listâ€. According to Joe Gardener, “In their effort to provide more eco-friendly solutions, The Scott's Company has answered the challenge to this ongoing problem and hit a homerun in the process.†As the web site says “An easy to use on/off control lever instantly activates a shield below the hopper that prevents fertilizer and other chemicals from being thrown onto areas where it is not intended, such as waterways, streets and other impervious surfaces.†So there you go, a spreader that applies the product where its suppose to go is now an “eco-friendly solutionâ€.
Making products that work better is always a good thing. It’s just that calling it eco-friendly smacks of pandering. Where does it stop? Sure a spreader that doesn’t throw fertilizer and pesticides where they are not needed is good, but eco-friendly? Wouldn’t pulling out the lawn be even more eco-friendly? Why not just say the spreader works better? Because it doesn’t sound as cool as “eco-friendlyâ€. We are about to be inundated with “eco-friendly†everywhere we look. It will become just another phrase without a lot of meaning to get consumers interest.
It's taken about 30 years for eco-friendly to become mainstream. It makes you wonder what the people who where there at the beginning of the eco-movement are thinking. Stuart Brand, the publisher of the first Whole Earth Catalog recently started to criticize the international environmental movement he helped inspire. He wrote an article in Technology review that might surprise lots of people who have known of Brand and his work all these years.