As part of the epic Twitter carry community, we are pretty often sent links to radness. One such recent link was a way to melt plastic bags together to make a Tyvek like material, that can then be stitched into a totally unique messenger bag. Sound interesting? Then read on…
The link was via Austin Saylor (@FullHarbor), and looks at a video by Make zine. If you haven’t checked Make before, it is like a great big bundle of weekend fun, encouraging you to get down and dirty with DIY geekery.
So following are a few screen snaps to try and get you inspired to click the link and watch the vid. Just seeing how rad the plastic bag fusion results are was enough to get me excited.
Links:
And image sets on Flickr.
Ando will write reviews that run for pages, he’ll never think a carry piece is fully resolved, and he’ll always call it out if it should be. Oh, and he’s a co-founder of Carryology.
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I like everything about this process except for one particular step… removing the buckles/hardware from a seemingly perfect lightly used children’s backpack. Now the polyesters, PU, webbing, excess hardware, potentially PVC, all end up in a landfill early… all to create a new product (the messenger) which will also end up in a landfill eventually when the materials wear out.
Perhaps that would have been a perfect backpack for a young child and their lower-income family to pick up at Goodwill for a few bucks to last a year or two of school.
I know I’m not offering a solution, and there may or may not be one. But the world of sustainability is riddled with trade offs which need to be carefully considered. It certainly is difficult, as there is always two sides of the sword with every decision made in the design/manufacturing/distribution process of a sustainable product.
Yeah, we hear you on the waste aspect. I cringed on that one too. If only hardware was cheaper to buy directly…
In the meantime, we guess pulling apart an old and failed bag would be the best bet, if you can find an appropriate one.
If you noticed, he used the old seat belt and just some velcro to hold his bag together, so he didn’t actually destroy anything at all. They probably just grabbed an available bag that way lying about (maybe his daughter’s) to use for an example. People who are going to try this are the sort who are thinking about reusing garbage anyway and aren’t going to ruin some thing like that backpack.