Would you be willing to pay $133 for a tote bag made all out of waste? The leather factory, based in New York, is using a 40-year-old loom for weaving plastic bags into reusable tote bags.
The city used to deal with 23 billion of these plastics every single year before finally banning them in 2020, and a sizeable chunk of them was never recycled.
Pierre Dabagh has been a part of it and has been running Park Avenue International since 1982, but wasn’t very sure to go about it when his son, Alex Dabagh, pitched him to make tote bags from plastic waste.
The idea hit Alex when he was taking out the trash one night. “I realized if this is one family’s garbage in a single week, what are the other 8.5 million people in New York City doing?”, says Alex, owner and president of ANYBAG.
It starts with Alex and his team separating all the plastic bags by size. The shop was fortunate enough to already be having all the required pieces of equipment in hand, the same machines used for constructing pretty much all kinds of leather goods.
The bags are fused together using a heat sealer and cut into long strips. The strips are spooled into yarn-like structures, which are then woven together in a handloom.
“To work with plastic is a novel experience. It’s different. But also, I see it is important because we are helping to save our world, our planet.”, said Ruben Foster, a worker at ANYBAG.
Figuring out ways to combine harder plastics with ones took a good number of trials and errors. It takes around 4 hours to make just one bag, and the tote made can easily hold a weight of up to 50-75 pounds. The ends of the bags are cut out, and they get stitched on the bindings and handles.
It takes about 95 plastic bags to manufacture one ANYBAG tote bag, which is an abbreviation for “a New York bag.” So far, the company has sold nearly 300 pieces.
In the starting days, Alex used to collect plastics from friends and family. But he scaled up the operation in 2020, partnering with fashion retailers and even elementary schools to collect their plastic waste. He now has over 8000 pounds of plastic waste as a raw material to work with.
Alex markets these $133 ANYBAGS as a luxury item. “The cost of the ANYBAG really reflects the process of the making of it. The weaving process alone is very time-consuming, which costs a lot of money, especially being here in New York City.”, he adds.
Tazeen Ansari