Search - Alter Eco on DVD

Short Attention Span 30 Somethings Try

Daniel G. Lebryk | 03/28/2009

(1 out of 5 stars)

"This is series is more fluff than content. Mostly what happens, the crew gets together, they talk, one guy works, and the rest come up with ideas of things to go off and do. The model and Adrian tend to go off and find food, wine, decorations, or clothes. The guy that owns Ecovation is the only person that actually works, he's a bit like the remodeling guy from the Oprah show. There's another guy that goes off and finds causes or friends to go do things. And then there's Mr. Money guy with his Bentley convertible (eco because it runs on ethanol, or so the film keeps pointing out).

In general a 45 minute episode starts with some good idea. The bearded slacker Adrian shows up with the model, they all spend about 5 minutes saying hello, shaking hands, kissing, and saying sustainable. He then comes up with a cool thing he's figured out, it rarely has to do with work, and he and the model take off. The Mr. Construction guy is usually left behind to build something for everyone else, like a table, a fire place, a toy box, etc. The Bentley guy stands around in his Armani suit and just talks about how green and sustainable his construction company is. And talks a big talk about separating construction waste. And the last guy sort of floats around by himself coming up with some other really useful idea. After everyone goes off and does their cool things, they all meet back at night and have a party with all the new friends they found along the way.

There's so much wrong with this premise of this series. This group seems to want to try hard. But nothing they do is really connected to making a difference. The model constantly talks about organic cotton. The guys mostly say the word sustainable. The perfect example of inneffectiveness is the cotton / blue jean insulation. They find out that great insulation is made from cotton, waste blue jeans. The model knows a designer that manufactures blue jeans. They go there and find out that his plant alone produces tons of fabric waste a day. There's a company that does blue jean events at local colleges. So the idea is, marry these two, and we could have tons of great insulation. Well it all falls apart because the jean collecting group is nothing more than a middle man to ship jeans to a company in Arizona. And in fact they are in business to advertise themselves and really want nothing to do with the bulk fabric. So there's a good idea that just goes way flat.

The pretext of the whole program is to green rennovate a house and make it AlterEco headquarters. If the group just did that, this would be an interesting series. If they just did all their odds and ends, that might be interesting. But instead they blend the two and it just comes off as a bunch of slackers that have no attention span and want to do random things.

Just can't recommend this series at all. It's no wonder no network has picked this up for broadcast. Oh and let's not talk about the distribution green part of this DVD series! Three discs that could have really been put on one, packaged in a paper shipper. Nope, it's a big plastic clamshell."