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Earth911 talks with FreeWater Inc. founder Josh Cliffords, who has a radical thought to make water, juice, and, in the end, a variety of merchandise accessible without spending a dime utilizing the identical enterprise mannequin as on-line providers like YouTube, using advertising. Josh shares a imaginative and prescient that features constructing in a restoration system for packaging, utilizing aluminum cans and hemp cartons made and crammed close to the shopper, and 10 cents of every sale to help constructing water and sanitation programs world wide. Josh says he “desires to alter the expertise of giving to charity and giving again to society and make it so simple as ingesting a free bottle of water or consuming a free slice of pizza.”
Here’s the way it will work: The firm will present ad-labeled water to prospects — akin to auto dealerships, gyms, and retail areas — which can have a cooler filled with carton water, for instance, that features promoting with scannable codes. FreeWater earns its income from that promoting. You may also order water for supply to your own home. Someday, it could possibly be delivered by Uber-like service individuals who additionally decide and course of the empties for recycling.
While it’s early within the lifetime of FreeWater, we discover this one of the attention-grabbing enterprise ideas we’ve heard shortly. Josh envisions native manufacturing facilities, and explains how McDonald’s might present ad-supported food and drinks, and use reusable, recyclable, and compostable packaging. Since promoting helps monitoring of packaging, it may additionally assist monitor flows throughout the client items market, which might result in the fast evolution of efficiencies — in the present day’s economic system wastes a lot that the financial savings might ship immense enhancements in sustainability.
Josh estimates that if 10% of Americans select FreeWater, the 10-cent contributions might present sufficient funding to ship water programs to the roughly 800 million people around the world who don’t have access to clean water and as much as 3.6 billion individuals who expertise a month of water shortages every year. It’s an enormous thought dealing with many challenges, together with the additional commercialization and providing many permutations that could possibly be utilized in several meals and items markets.
Don’t miss the interview. The FreeWater story will get you considering. It’s a radical concept that simply would possibly work.
