#HTE

Flotspotting: Gabriella Jacobsen’s Onward Bag

Last year we looked at the Cradle to Cradle Product Design Challenge, and this month they’ve advanced to Challenge II. The winning project in Challenge II’s Student Design category, Gabriella Jacobsen’s Onward Bag, points to a potential solution for the plastic garbage increasingly finding its way into the ocean.

As we mentioned in the last entry on ocean garbage, bottles and cans are relatively high-value items for the impoverished recycler/scavengers plying the polluted shores of Asia. But the other bits of floating plastic must also be made to increase in value, and Jacobsen, an industrial design student at Virginia Tech, designed her Onward Bag to be made from discarded plastic bags.

The Ocean Conservancy, which conducts an International Coastal Cleanup program, has found that plastic bags were firmly in the Top Ten of trash items accumulating on beaches. (Cigarette butts are number 1, with a disgusting 2,248,065 tallied by the OC in 2015.) But as we mentioned in the previous entry, plastic bags are low-ticket items for scavengers, who can make much more going after drinks containers. “Yet the High Density Polyethylene used in plastic bags is 100% recyclable,” Jacobsen writes on her project page, “and relatively easy to recycle should the bags be returned to a proper recycling bin or facility.”

I saw an opportunity to re-use the plastic bags, encourage recycling through design, and create a product that would appeal to a larger, tech savvy market. By using a recycled material one could lower the price of an insulated bag while still having a valuable design in comparison to the price of bags that used leather or high- grade textiles as part of their products.

Jacobsen began experimenting with the material, discovering the following (words hers):

Prototyping - By using a hair-straightener and a clothing iron I was able to fuse plastic bags together without melting them. I conducted several experiments to find the right temperature for the right amount of time. Then, I created several chipboard patterns that I ironed plastic bags over to get the pattern pictured [below]. The pattern with the thicker details was more readable than the thinner detailed design. 

I also realized that the layers of pressed plastic would create a very good insulating or padding material. This realization became crucial to why I decided to create a tech/ laptop bag instead of a standard backpack. Most tech bags require minimal to moderate padding to protect and insulate the laptop or technology inside. Current isolation foams are not sustainable or recyclable while the pressed plastic bags had the opportunity to be both.

Stamp Storyboard - I developed an aluminum stamp system to press the patten into the plastic bags. Pictured here is the story board of how I would heat a section of the aluminum stamp to prototype.

Aluminum Stamp - Pictured here is a 6x6 inch prototype of the aluminum stamp that I milled using a CNC. Once cut, the stamps would be able to heat stamp hundreds of thousands of bags before wearing out. Also, only recycled plastic, and the heat stamp are required to make the plastic fabric - making the process essentially waste free. At the end of the stamp’s life, the aluminum will be fully recycled in an aluminum recycling facility.

The finished design of the fully-recyclable Onward Bag involves cotton canvas and thread, and the details can be read here. What we really wanted to focus on was the intelligence and doability of her process: Jacobsen identified a readily available raw material, and by experimenting with common items one might have lying around in a dorm room, designed the roots of a simple manufacturing system.

What I would love to see is if Jacobsen’s project could attract some kind of funding allowing her to visit, say, those countries with the highest amounts of plastic waste washing up onshore. If she could then design other plastic-bag-integrating products, items specifically needed by the local populace–like the unsung scavenger/recylers mentioned in the last entry–she could potentially increase the interest in getting those overlooked bags out of the water while helping the local community. Better still, if she could develop locally viable production methods close to the source of refuse, then engage with local creatives to develop more uses for it, it could potentially stop the bags from making it into the water in the first place.

To be sure, there would be kinks to be worked out: Bags harvested from the ocean would presumably need to be cleaned, production lines set up, facilities for inventory raised, transportation links established, et cetera. But design thinking like Jacobsen’s, and Ceglinski and Turton’s garbage-collecting Seabin, are the beginning of the solution to waterborne waste.

Congratulations, Gabriella!

http://www.core77.com/posts/45171/Flotspotting-Gabriella-Jacobsens-Onward-Bag