Many of us do our best to donate our old clothes when purging our closets at the end of a season, and still others do their part by shopping at used or vintage clothing stores. But still, thousands of pounds of clothes a year end up in garbage dumps, never to be worn again. In fact, even at Goodwill, the necessary policy is that any item left on the floor after 30 days is automatically tossed into the discard bin, regardless of its condition.
But a new project/fashion line called William Good, the brainchild of Joe Boxer founder Nick Graham, is turning Goodwill rubbish into hipster gold. William Good clothes are made entirely out of discarded Goodwill garments, re-cut, re-fashioned, and re-imagined as one-of-a-kind items. The line will be sold at boutique-like pop-up shops within Goodwill stores, starting first with a pilot run in a San Francisco store.
The Bay Area Goodwill is the first in the country to try this pilot project, with the ultimate ambition of taking the line to the mass market and, in the process, saving 75 percent of all its donated items from ending up as landfill.
About 50 items from the initial collection will also be available at www.shopwilliamgood.com.
SF Gate: S.F. designer Nick Graham teams up with nonprofit Goodwill to recycle fashionably
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What a cool idea!
November 13th, 2007 at 12:42 am
I’m not sure about elsewhere, but in VA, Goodwill sells the unsold clothing overseas, in bulk.
November 13th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
There’s been some confusion about Goodwill’s recycling practices in the San Francisco Bay Area. We currently divert 75% of all our donations from landfill through resale and recycling, and our goal is to divert 100%. When clothing doesn’t sell in our stores for 30 days, it gets pulled off the floor and sent to recycling, not landfill.
November 15th, 2007 at 3:04 pm