Turning Plastic Trash Into Luxury Bags _ One Small Step

Soft plastic is notoriously hard to recycle. That's because it gets caught in recycling machinery, which then causes that machinery to break down and can cost recyclers millions of dollars a year in repairs. The problem is so bad that most recycling companies, they don't even accept soft plastic. That's where Anybag comes in. This local recycling solution based in the heart of Manhattan is taking soft plastic from the community and weaving it into these durable and reusable bags. I'm Lucy Biggers, and this is One Small Step, today's episode sponsored by Fidelity. It's hard to believe that plastic bags weren't a part of American life until the 1980s. Today, it seems like everything comes wrapped in soft plastic packaging, like bread, meat, dry cleaning, individually wrapped delivery items, and more. Globally, it's estimated we go through over 500 billion plastic bags each year. Unfortunately, recycling infrastructure hasn't kept up with this boom, and a minuscule amount of plastic bags get recycled each year. Founder of Anybag, Alex DeBogge, witnessed this problem and decided to do something about it. So one day I was actually just taking out my garbage, and I looked back and I was like, if I'm taking this much recycling out, this much trash, I was like, what's the rest of New York City doing? What are the other eight and a half million people that live here doing? And then it just blew my mind. So I started coming up with different ways to reuse our waste. Alex decided to use equipment from his father's leather handbag factory to start weaving plastic scraps into fabric. My dad thought I lost my mind. My employees thought the same thing. Like, we went from making these luxury leather bags, and all of a sudden I started collecting tons and tons of plastic and getting donations from random people, people dropping off plastic every other day, and my dad was like, what are you doing with all this garbage? And I was like, I got an idea. Like, I got a plan. Like, this is my eureka moment. It's gonna work. Started experimenting and weaving plastic, different thicknesses, different gauges, different weights of plastic, until we figured out the right ratio from soft to heavy. You know, here we are almost a year and a half later, two years later, and, you know, we're weaving, we've weaved over 1,000 pounds of plastic, saved it, and, you know, we're creating Eddie bags from it. This is newspaper. Yeah, that's newspaper. Like, every bag is a little bit of New York City. Like, every panel, you can pinpoint where that plastic came from, what neighborhood, what bodega, what corner store. So it's like, it's pretty cool, like, when you put it all together. Eddie Bag has set up plastic collection partnerships with six New York schools and a few packaging companies. So we're taking all their plastic that literally has maybe an hour to maybe a two-week life cycle, where it's just getting shipped from point A to point B, and it's brand new plastic. So we're taking all that and recirculating it. I partnered up with this local supermarket in Bay Ridge where I live, where I'm taking all their plastic that customers bring back from their shopping bags, and we're bringing that back in and repurposing it. And then also from all the plastic that we get in here, from whether it's a film of paper towels, a toilet paper, film on a canvas roll of fabric, a leather roll of fabric, all that, we're reprocessing everything. So it's like we're taking everything almost that comes through this place, just about 95% of it, and recirculating it and giving it a second life. Since their launch in February 2020, they've collected 6,000 pounds of plastic. It's so much plastic, they filled the basement of their building. So right here, I'm standing in front of about 6,000 pounds of plastic that we've collected over the last year and a half. It is packed to the gills and goes all the way back. There's about maybe 60 to 75 large contractor bags, size trash bags full of used plastic. This is, this happens to be some mailers from JCPenney. But I mean, each bag is different from different parts of the city that all the school kids have collected, that we've collected and we're storing for one day to cut up and use. But all this trash gives you this bag right here. So far, they've been able to upcycle 700 pounds of that plastic into 350 bags. Making the Anybag starts with first collecting plastic, then sorting, cutting, and lying the pieces flat. Next, workers connect the bags with a melting joint, creating one long line of plastic similar to a long line of fabric used in weaving. Next, the plastic is fed through a big weaving machine. They can weave seven yards of fabric per day, which makes about 15 bags. The plastic fabric is then cut to size, handles are added, and the pieces are sewn together. I wanna take a moment to thank Fidelity for sponsoring this episode. Fidelity's Climate Action Fund allows people to invest their money in companies that are taking action against the impacts of climate change. Not only does this help support businesses with sustainable practices, it allows investors to rest easy knowing their money is helping the planet and inspiring change. Head over to fidelity.com to learn more about sustainable investing with the Climate Action Fund. Now, back to the episode. The bags sell on the Anybag website and are still pricey, but Alex hopes the price can come down as they scale. Proceeds from the bag go to the City Parks Foundation. Are you making money off of this as more of a raising awareness thing and giving back thing, or is it a little bit of both? A little bit of both, but our margins on this are so low because of how time consuming and how expensive it is to make the textile. The ultimate goal for the program is for other cities, other states, to adopt a program where we build workshops there. We'll take everything we've learned with the Anybag and build a little factory or a little space where it's a drop-off center for plastic, raising awareness, educational center. We create jobs, teach people how to weave the plastic, and then make the bags there and recirculate it. This way, every city has almost zero carbon footprint. What is one small step that people can take? What I say is just shop better, do better, and don't let perfect get in the way of progress. We can't just eradicate it completely, but as long as we find a better use or a second life afterwards, I think it's a win-win for all. I love it. I absolutely love how Alex stepped up to take on plastic waste in his own way, and it really embodies the one small step spirit. He saw a problem and he took steps to fix it on his own terms, and look what he's created. It's absolutely amazing. That is all for this episode. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you next time. Bye!