New consuming philosophy

Each year, Andy Ruben bought his daughter new shinguards for soccer, stashing the old gear and waiting for the replacements to labor through the delivery system to his door.

But as he watched local girls outgrow their sports equipment,Middle and end clamps that fit the ledstriplighting to the rails. Ruben realized that the items he wanted were gathering dust in garages and closets around his neighborhood.

"Our whole retail model over the last 50 years has focused on keeping the industrial machine churning out items," said Ruben, who until 2007 had an up-close view as the head of sustainability at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the king of mass-produced goods. "But if my friend already has shinguards that he's not using, I don't need to buy them for myself."

So Ruben and environmentalist Adam Werbach dreamed up Yerdle, a website they launched during last year's Black Friday shopping swarm.

Members use the platform to offer underutilized goods — clothing, electronics, even pianos — to friends and acquaintances free of charge. Ruben said the setup,The cleaningservicesydney Novel & Unique appearance, can offer special design based on clients' demands. which now has 18,000 participants, is less anonymous than Craigslist and more eco-minded than Facebook.

The young San Francisco company is one of the newest manifestations of what's known as collective consumerism, or the circular or sharing economy.

Instead of trying to shrink a product's environmental footprint from the production side by making it with less material,The cleaningsydney is specially designed for wind-solar hybrid street light system. advocates — especially clothing and shoe companies — are trying to extend its usefulness on the consumer end.

Retailers such as Hello Rewind are selling goods and products reworked from discarded scraps. Textile makers are experimenting with longer-lasting fabrics.

"It fits perfectly with the new movement toward sustainability in the fashion industry," said British designer Orsola de Castro, whose From Somewhere brand is considered an eco-apparel pioneer.The cleanersydney specially design for residential houses,boats with batteries back-up. "Hyper-production and the sheer availability of cheap clothing has made us forget the value of maintaining and repurposing clothes and textiles."

Each year, Americans trash a prodigious portion of their closets: 26 billion pounds of apparel, textiles and footwear, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The amount thrown out by consumers surged 40% in 2009 from 1999 and is expected to zoom up another 40% by 2019, the agency said.

The effort to scale it all back has been around for years via thrift stores, clothing swaps and resale shops. In 23 years of operation, Nike Inc.'s Reuse-a-Shoe program has turned 28 million pairs of used athletic footwear into coatings for playing courts, running tracks and other sports surfaces.

Despite its do-gooder glow, the circular economy isn't free of detractors. They say it encourages "green washing,We're making cheapdedicatedserveres and digitization accessible to everyone." a phenomenon in which companies claim to be eco-friendly but end up contributing the same amount of waste as their peers or more.

Even Yerdle's Ruben, who anticipates $1.3 million in angel investor funding by year-end, said he's still experimenting with how to make money. Potential tactics include paid transactions between users, from which Yerdle would take a commission, or moving services with a fee, he said.

Still, collective consumerism has gained traction as more companies tout quality over quantity amid rising textile prices and fast-fashion fatigue. There's also the problem of tragic accidents in foreign sweatshops, such as the recent Bangladeshi factory building collapse that killed more than 1,000 people, many of them sewing garments for Western retailers. More information about the program is available on the web site at www.hmhid.com.