The latest creation to help you care for the environment is a bag made from old plastic bottles.
Ucon Acrobatics makes its bags by recycling plastics and reusing materials, and with this method, 20 plastic bottles can create a new backpack and make the planet a little bit cleaner.
Worryingly, around 140m tons of plastic are floating in our oceans, with about six million more getting added each year and Ucon hopes to make a small contribution to lessening the amount of plastic that ends up in the sea.
In the first step of manufacturing, plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate – PET for short, a plastic from the polyester family – are collected, the remaining contents washed out, labels and lids removed. In the next step, machines sort the bottles by colour and then shreds them. The plastic particles are then melted down, poured into small pellets and new threads are drawn from them. This means that no new crude oil is spun into yarn. This polyester yarn is very light, can be easily processed into durable fabric and is therefore particularly suitable for their backpacks.
All their products are certified by PETA and Ucon Acrobatics has eliminated toxins from its products and packaging, including environmental toxins (such as bleaches, pesticides and heavy metals) and other toxins (carcinogens used in poorly controlled leather dyeing or hard chrome plating processes), as well as allergens such as nickel.
