Just a month ago eBay launched a fashion site where you can buy and sell clothing, shoes, and accessories. Of course, quite a few items at fashion.ebay.com are new but you can find some used clothing that really rocks. We thought this vintage wool cocktail dress from the 50′s was pretty stylish.

On the other side of the pond, the UK’s ASOS.com, the largest independent online fashion and beauty site in England, announced yesterday that they are launching an online marketplace giving their customers a place to recycled their fashions. The new site will also be open to small businesses and independent labels to promote their own products. You can expect to see some overstock items offered as well.

Nick Robertson, ASOS chief executive, told The Financial Times, “We have 7.5 million fashion-loving customers coming to the ASOS website every month and I want them to be able to recycle their wardrobes among each other.”

Like eBay, ASOS’s new site will focus offer both new, used, and vintage clothing. However, they are shying away from the auction model; items will be sold at a fixed price. ASOS also intends to help sellers make the most of the items by giving advise on how to display and describe pieces for sale.

The new online marketplace is expected to launch later this year.

This staff post is by Timothy Evans. He has worked for Transprint for eight months in our IT department. In a former life, Tim has also worked as a graphic designer. In addition to his work in our New York office, being a husband, and father, he attended the Parsons School of Design.

My 8-year-old daughter, Maritai, came home from school a few weeks ago and, as usual, I asked her what she had learned that day. Turns out, it was a lesson on the values of the “Three R’s.” But not the ones you’d expect. Maritai was talking about Reduce – Reuse – Recycle.

The lesson showed the kids that there are many simple things one can do to make the earth a better place for the future. Maritai reminded me that using something once and tossing it into the trash is a wasteful habit. Maritai told me, “We are the stewards of our planet.” Sounds like the lesson certainly caught her attention.

Of course, this wasn’t news for Maritai. At home, we teach our children about the importance of recycling. For example, the entire family diligently separates out paper, plastic, and aluminum for trash day.

But, it dawned on me that I should take this issue more seriously, especially when the lesson comes from an 8-year old who will one day inherit this planet. Not to mention, it’s important that, as a parent, I give my children and others the opportunity to enjoy the beauty of our wonderful world.

After our chat, I had an idea for a project to really bring the “Three Rs” home for our children.

old chairs become re-new chairs

The problem was that my kids have several old, dirty chairs that we were thinking about replacing. But that wouldn’t due, not now. We weren’t going to toss these in the trash and buy new ones. Instead we’ll reduce landfill by reusing the old chairs and recycling a few yards of sample fabric from the Transprint office.

As you can imagine, the Design Studio in New York creates quite a lot of samples. We have fabrics of all types with beautiful designs. But, they do go out of fashion but still serve a purpose.

I brought home a few choices and working with my kids, I allowed them to choose a pattern they liked and we began to reupholster the chairs. It didn’t take that long, and they looked great. Not to mention, we embraced the Three R’s concept.

Fortunately, I work for a company that is also committed to sustainability. The entire team is dedicated to conserving water by encouraging the textile industry to use AirDye technology, which also saves energy, reduces pollutants, lowers cost, and promotes strict global environmental standards while producing beautiful textile products. I’m happy to be a part of the solution, and my kids love their “re-new” chairs.

Earlier this month we gave you a few gift ideas for the treehugger in your family. One of the suggestions was a rain barrel to capture and recycle water for landscaping or even indoor use.

Well, turns out quite a few people are getting into rain harvesting. KQED’s Quest had a great piece on the radio today on how it’s working for a few communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. We thought you might like to hear the story and read the reporter’s notes which includes links to site that can show you how to set up a rain capture system of your own.

One interesting bit, it’s illegal in some communities to disconnect your downspout from the sewer system. So, be sure to check on your local building codes before setting up your system.

What do you think about harvesting your rainwater? Is it worth the effort and cost?

photo credit: thanh.ha.dang / flickr

Our Friends over at DMD Green have created a new sustainability program called SocialCycling. The goal is to bring transparency and verification to the recycling process. The program is designed to encourage businesses to partner with organizations to reuse items that are not usually, or easily recycled.

One example, sited in this interview with Jason Warnock and Stacy Richter of DMD Green, is of an American company sending PVC scrap to Africa. Instead of ending up in a dump, the PVC is made into back pack linings. As Warnock says:

What we have done is solve a business problem for a US manufacturer, an African producer and hopefully, even helped some actual people along the way. To me that is the truly exciting part of environmental sustainability.

Just imagine what could happen if more organizations started to look at their waste as a resource; and if manufacturers looked at waste as a raw material. Seems to us that this is the ultimate in environmental sustainability: never drawing from “virgin” materials to create the products we need and want.

Here’s the question, what waste products does your company create that need to be SocialCycled? Perhaps we can spark a new partnership right here on Good for Water!

As we were checking out this morning’s blog posts, we saw this over at Treehugger: The US Consumes 1500 Plastic Water Bottles Every Second, a fact by Watershed.

We knew American’s were a plastic-loving bunch, but this number really struck home. Not only for its excess, but for the opportunity all those plastic bottles represent. Unfortunately, the sad fact is that only about 20 percent of those bottles make their way into the recycling bin.

In this economy, just think of the new jobs could be created if  we focused on this “resource.” Here’s a sample of what we can make by recycling those 47,335,389,000 plastic bottles used each year:

Clearly, we need to significantly reduce our use of plastic bottles. But there are already billions and billions of them in our landfills. Realistically, we’re not going to end our addition cold turkey either. We’d like to see more businesses use recycled plastic, especially for clothing and carpet.

What would you do with all those discarded plastic water bottles?