divine green: Sustainable Home, Beauty, & Lifestyle

By Alorie Gilbert

Can you relate to Katherine Heigl in the movie 27 Dresses? Even if just one or two bridesmaids garments are gathering dust in your closet, take a look at Donatemydress.org.

The site, just launched by publishing giant Hearst, offers a national directory of organizations that collect special occasion dresses for teens in need of prom gowns that won’t break the bank. The site also provides details on upcoming dress drives (prom season is underway!) and giveaways, and features photos of teens in donated duds.

I applaud Hearst, publisher of Seventeen and Cosmogirl, for promoting dress donation, but why not take it a step further? Why not tell gals that recycled dresses aren’t just easy on the wallet, they’re easy on the earth, too.

Find out where to donate your old frocks here.

While major U.S. companies like Nike struggle to go green, young rivals are establishing eco habits from the get-go.

Portand, Ore.-based Nau, a maker of hip outdoor clothing, this month will introduce its spring line of jackets, pants and tops made of organic cotton, renewable polyesters and low-toxic dyes. This spring, it also plans to open a small retail outlet on Chestnut street in San Francisco, as one of eight new retail stores this year (for a total of 12 around the country).

Mark Galbraith, head of design for Nau and former Patagonia designer, spoke recently in San Francisco about the company’s history and approach. (more…)

Most sneakerheads don’t know it, but Nike’s newest $235 Michael Jordan shoe could flatter any environmentalist’s wardrobe. The shoe, named XX3 (after the sport star’s jersey number), which goes on sale nationally this month, is made with fewer toxins and produces less waste in the manufacturing process than most sneakers.

Nike’s not hyping that fact in advertising for the last–and most expensive–in its line of celebrated Jordan sneaks for fear that the message would be lost on its core buyers. But the shoe is made with a new technique that requires no chemical solvent to bond fabric to a carbon plate, a first for any basketball shoe, according to Jane Savage, chief sustainability officer at Nike.

“That shoe sends up the flare that you can have a profitable and sustainable shoe,” Savage said while speaking at CompostModern 2008, a recent design conference in San Francisco.

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Organic baby clothing companies are growing up. Speesees a San Francisco-based maker of fair-trade and organic cotton clothes for infants to (terrible) two-year-olds, has expanded this spring to include spunky-designed dresses and jumpers for kids up to 4 years. Speesees (after the way a child might say “species”) is an artful collection of animal-printed clothes that prove “green” doesn’t have to be crunchy. And the cotton is good for babies with sensitive skin.

Surely the move caters to more demand from eco-aware parents. When Speesees founder Rachel Pearson started designing her first onesie in 2003, there was very little in the way of cute, organic-cotton clothing to buy her friends raising families. But in recent years her business has exploded, with sales into more than 250 stores around the world, including Whole Foods, and through a newly redesigned Web site. (Roughly 15 percent of the company’s sales are directly from the Web.)

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SAN FRANCISCO–The well-heeled set came out in force this week at Global Green’s “Gorgeous and Green” third-annual charity event. Everyone from former Sex in the City actor Jason Lewis to local fashion designer Margaret O’Leary attended the benefit, which was designed to promote eco living ideas and raise money for California green schools and people adversely affected by Hurricane Katrina.

The event, held here at the environmentally certified Bently Reserve Building, was half high society promoting a cause and half a cause promulgating society. Local celebrities and luminaries, who paid anywhere between $250 for general admission to $5,000 for a VIP dinner, were treated to eco-friendly fare including grass-fed beef, fair trade coffee and organic tequila. The entertainment: a henna-tattoo booth, live auctions, models dressed like Marie Antoinette floating in the crowd, and a fashion show of eco-chic wear–items made of hemp silks and recycled tuxedo shirts (this from emerging designer William Good, featured here).

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TOKYO–”Eco” as fashion statement has definitely hit Japan’s capital–a jam-packed city of 8 million-plus, not including outlying areas.

Just visit one of Tokyo’s most eclectic home-shopping stores, Tokyo Hands, located in Shibuya. It’s eight floors of do-it-yourself and oddball items ranging from teak wood slabs for making your own coffee table to plastic toe stretchers. It’s also sprinkled with the latest environmentally friendly goods.

Here I found these “Eco Home Kitchen Bags” from Benetton–a rainbow-colored tastemaker in the 80s. A reusable bag for grocery shopping, the eco sack rolls up into a tiny case that you can port around in a pocket or stick to the refrigerator when not in use. Doubtful you can find this exact product in the United States, but similar gear is common in cities like San Francisco, which just banned the use of plastic bags in major grocery stores.

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Green gifts are certainly chic this holiday. Every media outlet ranging from House and Garden to Plenty has an eco-gift guide for the environmental shopper. Even chi-chi department store Barneys went green this year, with recyclable shopping bags and an eco-themed catalog. (I’m not sure $1,000 for a grocery-store handbag is the best way to go about conservation, but the idea is right.)

So what is the average eco-minded person looking for in a gift this year? Well, to start with, soap.

Lucas Heldfond, owner of San Francisco’s Spring, a store that sells earth-friendly home accents, said that many people are making their own gift baskets this year with Mrs. Meyers’ aromatherapy dish soap, countertop spray and all-purpose cleaner–products that don’t use toxic chemicals. Given that the packaging should be reusable, too, the products come in a bowl made of sustainable bamboo. The gift is thoughtful and useful, he said.

“What’s nice about green gifting is there’s a very practical side,” Heldfond said. “Dish soap isn’t typically a consumer gift, but this year, it’s chic.”

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What are the names of the new eco luxury? Apart from U.S. carmaker Tesla Motors and fashion designer Linda Loudermilk, they’re largely brands from foreign companies.

The World Wildlife Fund UK, a nonprofit conservation group, uncovered in a recent report that the world’s top 10 makers of luxury brands–the likes of Bulgari, Tiffany, LVMH–have less-than-stellar records on environmental and sustainable business practices. (Story here.) But in the report, it also singled out seven companies that are proving that luxury can be affordable to the eco conscious.

At a recent design conference in San Francisco, Alex Steffen, founder of Worldchanging.org, talked about “guilt-free affluence,” or the idea that you could enjoy the good life (read: having nice things) without knowing that those things came at the expense of a kid in Vietnam. To achieve that guilt-free existence, he said, people must know more about the origin of the products they buy, i.e., how and where is it made? He called that the “back story,” which is something very few companies publicly disclose today.

These are a few companies that are making their back story part of the brand.

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Gucci, Tiffany, Swatch, Bulgari. These luxury brands aren’t what you’d call divine green.In fact, their environmental stewardship scored them Ds and Fs on the World Wildlife Fund UK’s first study on the social and environmental performance of the world’s top 10 makers of high-end goods. (Report here. Beware, it loads slowly.) The top of the list, French cosmetics maker L’Oreal, scored a so-so C+ and was joined by French brethren Hermes and LVMH in the average set.The conservation group scored luxury makers by analyzing the companies’ self-reported data to environmental agencies and investors. It also looked at their overall media reputation for good governance, and social and environmental responsibility (or ESG). It examined practices related to “mining and farming, design, manufacturing, marketing, retail, use, re-use and eventual fate” of products, according to the report, called Deeper Luxury. It then gave each company a score (from 1 to 100) to designate a rank and grade. (more…)

What happens to all those Goodwill throwaways when they don’t sell in a local thrift store? As much as 75 percent ends up in landfill. Or equally bad, those too-tight Nike shorts and low-slung Gap jeans are shipped to third-world nations, where they clothe the poor.

That last part sounds noble, but the resulting glut of last-year’s baby-doll blouses and cargo pants from the U.S. ends up squelching demand for locally made clothing in underdeveloped countries desperate for their own self-sustaining economies. (That clothing might also layer landfills in places like India and Africa.)

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