Nicole Facciuto talks to Glenn Williams of Procter & Gamble Tuesday night at Lindale Mall in Cedar Rapids.
OK, so maybe you haven’t gone “green” yet. Procter & Gamble is giving people in the Cedar Rapids area a great incentive to do so. The company is giving away $10,000 to the winner of its Future Friendly Challenge.
Cedar Rapids was chosen as the pilot site for the company’s sustainability initiative, which isn’t a product launch, but an awareness effort to point out energy, waste and water savings involved with P&G products.
Nicole Facciuto, host of HGTV’s “Red, Hot & Green” was at Lindale Mall tonight (Tuesday, April 21) to help launch P&G’s effort and will be there from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday. She and others who will demonstrate the products can be found under a green tent near the Sears store at Lindale.
P&G’s Glenn Williams said the contest will continue at other Future Friendly events in the coming weeks, but is for the Cedar Rapids area only. Anyone who wants to enter the contest can pick up a form at Lindale or other locations in the next few weeks and write, in 300 words or less, how they have gone green, without sacrifice.
Nicole, whose show is shot in LA, noted that little things add up to help move the whole country toward sustainability. “I’m just here to tell people about it because I believe in the small steps,” she told me during a “tour” of the Future Friendly tent. Nicole, 33, said she’s no stranger to Iowa, having spent a summer at Lake Okoboji. She’s into Freecycle, recycling and once made a coffee table out of a pile of old books that a school discarded.
Products in the Future Friendly initiative are marked with a green sticker and are already at Hy-Vee supermarkets and will be in more Cedar Rapids stores in the near future. Glenn said Cedar Rapids was chosen because the community shows awareness about sustainability and “our target audience lives here.”
Update: Glenn just sent in more info on how to enter the contest:
The rules are simple: just tell us in 300 words or less about how you’re living a more “future friendly” lifestyle without making any deep sacrifices or trade-offs. Drop your entry at the FF pop-up or email it, and you could win the 10,000 dollars. Nicole and other FF experts will determine the winner.
The email address is: futurefriendly@yandlpr.com
Here is more about the pilot:
Procter & Gamble has chosen Cedar Rapids and Earth Day to launch a new sustainability initiative pilot. The new Future Friendly program will include products from P&G’s most recognized brands, including PUR, Charmin and Dawn. Each brand provides specific savings in water, waste or energy, with the resource-saving benefits marked on the packaging.
To launch the pilot, a Future Friendly demonstration house will be unveiled at Lindale Mall in Cedar Rapids on Earth Day, April 22, 2009, where visitors can see live product demonstrations and learn how they can take simple steps in their own homes to save energy, water and reduce waste.
Nicole Facciuto, host of HGTV’s “Red, Hot and Green” will be at Lindale Mall from 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. Wednesday to share environmental home design and lifestyle tips. Visitors can enter to win a $10,000 grand prize by submitting the best “go green without sacrifice” story in the Future Friendly Challenge. Each household that registers at Lindale Mall on Earth Day will receive a coupon book and a reusable shopping bag.
Examples of the Future Friendly resource savings include this: If all Iowa residents who use bottled water switched to a PUR faucet mount system, they would save more than $574 million each year – enough money to send nearly 5,000 students to Coe College for four years.
Look closely at the wording to see if those savings add up for your family. This example assumes that if one household switched from bottled water to a PUR mounted faucet system, they would be able to eliminate 3,200 plastic bottles and save $600 per year. If you don’t use bottled water, which has lost favor among the eco-conscious, those savings might not apply to you.
Other examples include: If all Cedar Rapids households switched from a regular roll of Charmin to Charmin MegaRoll, it would save more than 77,000 gallons of fuel – enough to fuel 44 school buses in Iowa for an entire year. And if all Cedar Rapids households cleaned their dishes with Dawn Direct Foam, without filling up the sink with water, they would save more than 600,000 liters of water – enough to irrigate more than six acres of Iowa farmland for one week.
P&G, which has two plants in Iowa City, notes that each Future Friendly product must meet strict, science-based performance criteria, including a reduction of more than ten percent in water use, energy use or waste versus previous or alternative products. In addition, the benefits of the products cannot trigger inefficiencies in other areas of environmental concern. The brands in the pilot program include Tide, Downy, Gain, Cheer, Dreft, Era, Dawn, PUR, Cascade, Charmin, Bounty and Duracell. Future Friendly has operated as a multi-brand effort in the UK and Canada since 2007.
For more information, see: www.future-friendly.com
Lindsey Pugh of Grayslake, Ill., demonstrates the absorbency of Bounty paper towel on Tuesday night at Lindale Mall.
Homegrown 