America Goes Green, the environment-conscious special series on the NBC Nightly News did a piece on EcoHangers, a company that is revolutionizing the way we, and our dry cleaners, hang our clothes.

You can think of it as environmentalism-meets-marketing-meets-recycling-meets-biodegradability. I think of it as smart.

The idea is simple. Give free EcoHangers to dry cleaners saving the dry cleaner 5 cents per metal hanger normally used. The cost of the free hangers are offset by the advertisements that are displayed on the biodegradable hangers that now hang in customers closets. To me, this is social enterprise at it’s best — using market mechanisms and paradigm-breaking methods to solve intractable social problems. In EcoHangers case, an end to the vast quantities of metal hangers being thrown into landfills (we use 3.5 billion metal hangers per year in this country alone), lowered costs for dry cleaners (hopefully shared with customers), environmental neutrality and great, new, highly targeted and highly lucrative advertising inventory. Seems like a win-win-win to me!

You can view Roger O’Neil’s piece called Greening Your Closet by clicking here.

You can learn more about EcoHangers at The Hanger Network