[hugh]

Lisa and Jeff R. Peri of Los Angeles depleted their $200,000 in savings, maxed out their credit cards and borrowed $300,000 from family and friends to develop and market their low-impact car-wash product. The concoction, Lucky Earth, comes in a quart-size spray bottle that retails for $17. It's a mixture of water, coconut by-products, sodium carbonate and water-soluble silicone, blended with the notion that eco-sensitive customers will gladly substitute some elbow grease for a garden hose.

Idealism-induced myopia combined with the current "green tech" fad is breeding some truly bad business ideas. This is one of them.

Seriously, I'm supposed to wash my entire car with a quart-sized seventeen-dollar bottle of mostly-water in order to save a few gallons of tap water? There's a small number of people out there who are dumb enough to pay for anything if they think it's "helping the environment" (at least until the next fad comes along to displace the green-panic fad of the moment) but the market seems really very limited, both in extent and in duration.