Absolutely fantastic. Every month this guy’s mom takes your old knitted garment and turns it into something new. Sustainable clothing, it’s called Reknit.

For January she’s turning your old sweaters into scarves. They’re available in 2 styles and are $30 each.

The note is great: If your sweater contains only one color, a complementing color will be picked & used for the stripes by my mom.

Last night (and early into the morning today) Quirky got crazy and developed a green product in 24 hours. What they came up with is called Petal Drops, a flower shaped funnel that fits on top of standard threaded water/soda bottles providing you with a chance to elegantly and easily capture rain water to water your plants. $4.50 and it’s yours!

Full Disclosure (Hat tip FTC): I’m an advisor to and shareholder in Quirky, inc.

My friend David is sailing from Los Angeles to Sydney on a boat he calls the Plastiki made entirely of recycled plastic bottles. What a nut case, right? I had agreed to go with him until I went on some sailing lessons and remembered how terribly (read: deathly) ill I get at sea.

Now I don’t even have to leave my bathtub to sail with this new toy Plastiki version though. Just in time for the holidays!

It’s made from cardboard approved by the Forest Stewardship council and printed with vegetable inks. Half the proceeds go to Sculpt the Future. The other half gets pooled into a life insurance fund for David. Only kidding.

Go read more about the Plastiki Expedition. And buy the toy. Awesome.

Perhaps a competitor to the Geneva Sound System (I’ve got one in my house and I LOVE it), is the Reverb Solar Powered iPod Dock (it stands 3 feet tall, so that’s some dock).

It has built in solar panels so it can be used outside your home power-cord free! It fits a majority of iPhones and iPods but also comes with a 3.5mm audio jack so you can use it with just about anything. It goes on sale April 2010 for $2,299 and you can pre-order now with a deposit of $500 (a serious leap of faith that it sounds as good as it looks). Looks great though!

The OeTZI3300 shoe brand is inspired by a prehistoric man named “Oetzi” who has been carbon dated all the way back to 3300 B.C. His mummified body was unveiled from it’s frozen state during “global warming” and he was wearing nothing more than the basic essentials he needed for survival– good gear for protection and warmth, as well as a unique pair of bad ass shoes.

These shoes above (more color-ways after the jump) are inspired by the simple yet functional design of Oetzi’s shoes, our need to be environmentally responsible, and the need to better promote the art of well being. The collection features a pair made of napa leathers and oiled suede, both with an insulating yet breathable stretch inner sock liner– and a cork footbed designed for comfort (it also gradually molds to your footscape as you wear them).

Proceeds of every sale go to the Arthritis Foundation, as it was discovered by tattoo’s found on Oetzi’s body that he too had symptoms of joint disease and was probably treated with a very primitive form of acupunture. The brands logo is inspired by these tattoos.

These shoes were designed by the same guy behind one of my all the favorites for comfort, the Royal Elastics Grata.  Congrats Ludovic!

READ MORE…

Congrats Jill! (Inhabitat founder Jill Fehrenbacher launched a new site, Ecouterre) Focused on, well, eco-fashion of course. Good luck!

I have written extensively about green companies – not just because being it’s the current hot trend, but because I feel it is what we must move towards in order to be sustainable. Today, a revolutionary clothing company launches. Formed by industry veterans with experience from Nike, adidas, and Royal Robbins, Looptworks takes the word green and flips it on its head. The company is attempting to produce 100% of it’s line from excess materials and components. In other words, it will create clothing from no new materials, instead re-using excess from factory floors that currently gets dumped into landfills. A typical textile factory produces 60,000 pounds of waste a week so source materials will not be a problem for the Portland, Oregon company but consistency in the supplies may be. As expected the collections are limited and, I expect them to be constantly evolving as Looptworks finds new materials to work with. The initial collection consists of 20 apparel pieces for both men and women and items range from jackets to skirts and graphic tees. The company is targeting an active lifestyle that brings together boards ports and outdoor activities, mixed with an urban aesthetic. I am personally very excited to see this business model catch on.

Green is the new black and this year companies are definitely heeding the call as more and more of them are adding eco-friendly elements into their product lines. Few though, can compare to El Naturalista, a Spanish footwear company that is built from the ground up as an earth-centric corporate citizen. El Naturalista has some key philosophies by which they operate: focusing on using natural and recycled ingredients and avoiding polluting and toxic substances in the manufacturing of their shoes and packaging. The Fall line is already making its way to retailers worldwide. Women should take a look at the Yggdrasil collection for subdued styling but with details that warrant a double take. For men, I am particularly fond of the Recyclus line which uses recycled rubber in the soles, cork midsoles, hand-sewn uppers and 100% recycled packaging. With a clear focus on nature and a design team that works hard to show that you don’t have to choose between style and sustainability, El Naturalista has this down pat. Look for their FW09 collection in stores now.

Get stickers, green businesses: the idea behind sustainability and consumer-focused company Viv is a simple and free one that could also be the best way to make your credit card look better (short of getting a black AMEX). After customers place a small sticker on the front of their debit or credit cards and show it at the time of purchase, participating retailers pledge to make energy efficiency and other green improvements to their businesses if enough stickers come through their doors and patronize. Grocery stores, bars, “eco-gourmet restaurants,” and liquor and convenience stores are all taking part, and their progress on their commitments to make their businesses more eco-friendly can be tracked by the community. San Francisco-based founder Arul Velan started the company after Stanford Business School and a stint at Facebook with the help of Dinesh Thirupuvanam, and the pair and their team have been seen recently at street fests and athletic events distributing their green stickers. A little good, a lil' green.

Growing Jewelry is a redefinition of modern values. It is a clash of jewelry and gardening; couture and organism. The collection of this hand jewelry is designed for people in metropolitan cities and is an experiment in drawing nature toward man, as nature being the presupposition of life.

Even the store is awesome. Via Trend.Land

Update:  Doh!  We scooped this on our own last year.  Silly me.

Crazy cute wool slippers made from recycled sweaters. If I had a toddler in the family, they’d be rocking around in these soft-soled recycled gems. For sale on Etsy!

The old street lamps in your neighborhood may still do their job of illuminating those darkened city streets with a flicker and a buzz here and there, but as time has gone on they’ve also managed to remain quite the drain on the electrical grid. The thoughtful folks at Urban Green Energy ask the question, “Why continue all of that energy consumption, when you could just as easily achieve the same effect off the grid?” Their Hybrid Wind/Solar Street lamp seems like an absolutely perfect environmentally friendly alternative to those old flickering lampposts littering city sidewalks. Instead of sucking at the teat of the local power source, these divinely designed sources of street illumination use nature’s own goodness in the form of the sun’s rays and the whispering wind to make sure you feel safe as you traipse from corner to corner and block to block once the center of the universe has set.

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“Custom, limited and upcycled” wares for men and women are the calling card of clothing upstart apliiq, and the results are punchy shirts, second life Reeboks, and jewelry. The Splesh V-neck tee and Oliver hoody look like something you might create yourself if you had good throwback checkered fabric, decent sewing skills and, oh yes, a solid design aesthetic– check them out.

Ethan Lipsitz started apliiq after stitching hoodies in his UPenn dorm room. “Philly has some great old fabric shops with basements and hidden corners–I felt like a DJ digging for rare records as I would build the fabric collection,” said Lipsitz, an urban development and design student who wanted to encourage customers to be inventive in selecting patterns. The company still uses basic methods and geometric shapes to show off bright materials, and some items can be found online at Cultist and Karmaloop. But the best (and most giftable) option is picking out your own materials and going to town with their team.

Italian designer Cecilia Felli knows what to do with a broken umbrella– turn it into an umbrella skirt. Pretty great! check out all her different creations over here.

Perennial VA/DC favorite Commonwealth has teamed up with Billabong for a series of board shorts made from a new fabric called Eco-Supreme Suede. The material is made from recycled pure polyester and can be recycled at the end of their life. It takes about ten recycled 12 oz plastic bottles to produce a pair of the tiger camo shorts. I am not a fan of the current options for men’s beachwear but depending how this new Billabong fabric feels, I will probably grab a pair when I am in DC next week. Via Highsnobiety