Fantastic Plastic on Show
by Bonnie Alter, London 
on 05.29.08
A small but interesting show of handbags made of recycled plastic gives an idea of the full range of innovation and creativity going on today in England. Some of treehugger's favourites such as the " I am not a plastic bag" and the Modbury free bags and Kate Ward's handbag were on display, as they should be. Ryan Frank's stool, Ishongololo, made out of orange Sainsbury recycled plastic bags was front and centre (pictured). There was a delightful key chain, crocheted to hold 3 blue plastic bags by Cerys Marks, doing her bit by knitting and crocheting plastic because "the UK grocery industry uses enough carrier bags to carpet the entire planet twice a year." Emma Neuberg took an old denim skirt and made it beautiful by using applique design created by heat-pressing colourful pictures from plastic bags and packaging (pictured after fold). A little stiff to wear everyday but a party special. Emma Berry also used skirts; only she made soft handbags out of old pleated ones.
We loved the idea of morsbags: download instructions to make a bag in half an hour out of an old curtain or sheet. Nat Thakur's bag of stripy recycled leather pieces is eye catching and attractive. Bags2riches makes some great looking bracelets of recycled plastic.
Curated by [re]design for NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, there are lots of interesting facts and figures to beef up their case against plastic.
--Londoners use 2.1 billion plastic bags every year – enough to carpet the capital one and a half times
--UK carrier bag waste = 100,000 tonnes a year: the weight of 14,000 double-decker buses
--Producing each plastic bag emits enough CO2 to fill 22 plastic bags
--75% of shoppers say they want an outright ban on single-use bags, yet 88% currently put all their shopping into free carrier bags
--On average each person in the UK uses over 290 plastic carrier bags per year
:: [re]design Via :: NESTA
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Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- Reuse Those Plastic Cups As Earrings
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- Chipotle Goes Green, Plus Recipe for Hormone-Free Braised Pork with Chipotle Peppers
- Build a Greenhouse without Going Broke
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All very nice, but recycling plastic bags is a concession, not a solution. The solution is not to use them in the first place.
John: make a morsbag if you don't want to use plastic bags! That's a solution.... :)
John, I completely disagree. It's not as if these artists are producing new plastic bags for their work. They are using materials that are already around and it's far better to make use of the millions of plastic bags that would otherwise end up in a landfill.
It isn't a concession to look at the waste we've already produced in a new way and try to make something good out of it. It's visionary.
It would be better if society had stuck with organic cloth bags or sustainable bamboo baskets from the start--but we didn't. So now we've got to A) Stop production of things made of harmful materials B) Start production of things with better materials and C) Try to re-use what is already made rather than compounding past choices by ignoring their consequences.
Would you rather see everybody dump the plastic bags they've accumulated in the trash just so they can go buy organic sustainables? That seems entirely against the point and ends up using more materials--however sustainable they may be.
I say bravo to cheeky and creative solutions to our waste issues.