eBay, that giant online garage sale, announced today that it will offer a new green shopping hub.

Mandala Record Clock made from an old vinyl album, and sold on eBay

The hub will help shoppers identify products that are green by virtue of being vintage or used; made of sustainable materials or designed to save energy.

The new shopping hub was formed as a response to eBay’s “Green Team” shoppers who’ve taken a pledge to be green. This online community, which eBay says is about 150,000 strong, has “committed to making greener lifestyle choices.”

Concurrently, eBay is partnering with Team Earth, a coalition of NGOs and private sector companies, to protect rainforests. For the first 250,000 people who pledge to reuse on eBay through its “Green Team Challenge” the company will protect an acre of rainforest in their name.

“We are delighted that eBay continues to demonstrate their strong support for the environment by becoming a member of Team Earth,” said Julie Blackwell, Senior Director of Team Earth at Conservation International. “eBay’s passionate community has changed the way we shop and we have no doubt that they can change the way we consume. They are a perfect partner to rally collective action around some of the most pressing environmental issues of our day.”

To stress its point about reusing consumer goods, eBay worked with Cooler, Inc., which calculates the carbon footprint of goods and activities, to develop some comparisons between recycled or reused items and the carbon cost of their new counterparts.

Cooler Inc. found that:

• Choosing a previously-loved leather handbag saves as much energy as a flight from London to Paris

• Selecting a previously owned watch saves the energy equivalent of 39 days of refrigerator use

• Choosing previously-worn leather shoes saves more energy than an average household uses in a day

For more details on using eBay more greenly, and on supporting the rainforest preservation, see the Green Team webpage.

Gucci Group said it plans to implement an industry-leading paper policy.

From Green Right Now Reports

Luxury brand Gucci Group said today it is joining forces with Rainforest Action Network and will eliminate all paper made from Indonesian rainforests and plantations and by controversial suppliers such as  Asia Pulp and Paper. The company said this is a first step in its plan to implement an industry-leading paper policy.

Rainforest Action Network officials said they are pleased to sign up the famous luxury house in its ongoing effort to protect Indonesian and other endangered forests. Since the beginning of Fall 2009, RAN has been urging the fashion world to more closely examine their paper supply chains and to sever any connection with paper suppliers like Asia Pulp and Paper who are actively destroying Indonesia’s rainforests.

“The Gucci Group’s actions and commitments confirm its place as an industry leader,” Lafcadio Cortesi, RAN’s Forest Campaign Director, said in a statement. “This move sets a bar for others in fashion and retail and demonstrates the foresight our society needs for our children and grandchildren to have standing rainforests and a stable climate.”

The Gucci Group’s move commits some of fashion’s most famous brands, including Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney and Balenciaga to perhaps the luxury industry’s strongest paper policy. With its new policy, the Gucci Group has pledged to reduce the amount of paper it uses, eliminate fiber from high conservation value forests, and only to purchase recycled products or those certified by the Forest Stewardship Council by December 2010. With this policy, they are ensuring that all paper categories used by the group, from copy paper to shopping bags, do not come from endangered forests such as those in Indonesia.

Gucci Group’s new policy puts them at the front of a growing list of major companies, including Tiffany & Co., H&M Group, Staples and Unisource who acting to clean their supply chains of rainforest paper and severing relationships with companies who continue to destroy rainforests in Indonesia or elsewhere.

“Standing rainforests are not a luxury, they’re a necessity if the world wants to stop climate change,” Mimma Viglezio, Executive VP Global Communications at the Group, said in a statement. “Our actions are lowering our own carbon footprint, but we hope that they will also raise awareness inside the fashion industry that it’s possible for our industry to make a difference for rainforests and for the climate.”

Worldwide, the degradation and destruction of tropical rainforests is responsible for 20 percent of all annual greenhouse emissions. The carbon emissions resulting from Indonesia’s rapid deforestation account for around eight percent of global emissions — more than the combined emissions from all the cars, planes, trucks, buses and trains in United States. This huge carbon footprint from forest destruction has made non-industrialized Indonesia the third-largest global greenhouse gas emitter, behind only the U.S. and China.

Greenpeace’s report “Slaughtering the Amazon” notes that Brazil’s thriving and expanding cattle trade, which has made it the world’s largest exporter of beef and the top producer (along with China) of leather, has out-sized environmental consequences.

“The cattle sector in the Brazilian Amazon is responsible for 14% of the world’s annual deforestation. This makes it the world’s largest driver of deforestation, responsible for more forest loss than the total deforestation in any country outside Brazil except Indonesia,” according to the report, the result of a three-year investigation by Greenpeace International.

The report’s findings suggest dire consequences for the planet if illegal deforestation associated with the beef and leather industries is not stopped because the Amazon rainforests absorb and hold huge quantities of carbon pollution.

“The Amazon is estimated to store 80-120 billion tonnes of carbon. If destroyed, some fifty times the annual GHG emissions of the USA could be emitted,” according to the report, which relied on government and research institute statistics.

“Slaughtering the Amazon” details how the cattle industry is growing in Brazil, fueled by favorable laws that encourage rapid growth and global companies such as Bertin, JBS and Marfrig that profess neutrality, but actually source from ranches that have moved into rainforest areas, according to the Greenpeace report, released in June.

“Greenpeace has identified hundreds of ranches within the Amazon rainforest supplying cattle to slaughterhouses in the Amazon region belonging to these companies. Where Greenpeace was able to obtain mapped boundaries for ranches, satellite analysis reveals that significant supplies of cattle come from ranches active in recent and illegal deforestation.”

Greenpeace investigators go on to explain that these goods travel into the food chain, unbeknown to consumers and often unchecked by Blue Chip companies worldwide. The products effectively vanish into the global market, becoming meat in packaged meals, leather upholstery in cars and fine Italian shoes.

Greenpeace supports many possible solutions including:

• More responsibility on the part of consumer companies in how they source and verify raw goods.
• Stronger world support for the Amazon Fund set up in Brazil  to help stop deforestation by providing alternative financial support to landowners and people living in the tropical regions — an idea that’s been roundly praised but thinly funded, mainly by Norway and Germany, according to Greenpeace.
• Leading industrialized countries must cut their carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2020 (compared with 1990 levels) to avoid a “tipping point” in which climate change careens forward unchecked. Greenpeace (among many other groups) wants world leaders to agree to this level of commitment at the Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen in December.
• A world commitment to zero deforestation by 2015 in the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and the Paradise forests of Southeast Asia, because these forests help slow global warming and also because they are home to indigenous peoples.