Like any person with a functioning conscience, we care about saving the environment. If we can help save the environment while also looking totally stylish, then that’s a nice bonus. Thanks to a new Kickstarter campaign from sustainable designers Tentree, we can now comfortably do both.
Tentree has launched the Mobius, a multifunctional backpack with a sustainable twist: Not only is it made almost entirely out of “upcycled” materials, but the company will also plant 10 trees for every unit that’s sold. To date, the company has planted more than 20 million trees, and aims to increase that total to an astonishing 1 billion trees by 2030.
The fabric of each Mobius Backpack is made out of 31 plastic bottles, while the webbing, clips, and buckles also come from plastic waste. Perhaps the biggest departure from the kind of materials you might ordinarily find in a bag is the use of a special foam padding, which comes from sustainably sourced algae biomass taken from lakes and ponds.
“The plastic bottles are collected and sorted, washed and chopped into flakes, cleaned, blended, and melted into chips,” designer Joey Pringle told Digital Trends. “The chips get transformed into fibers. This backpack is giving recycled bottles a new life instead of littering the landfills.”
Pringle said the team’s goal initially was to somehow make a high-quality, durable backpack using resources that were already around and could be cleverly reused. “We saw a blank canvas and opportunity since there wasn’t anything in the marketplace [like this],” he said. “That gave us … the platform to come up with the world’s most eco-progressive backpack.”
It certainly seems like customers are responding well to it. The project broke its $27,000 Kickstarter campaign goal within an hour of launching, and at time of writing has racked up $131,605. As we do for all crowdfunded projects and products, we offer our usual warnings about the risks inherent in crowdfunding campaigns. However, if you’d like to go ahead and get involved, you can head over to the project’s Kickstarter page to pledge your cash. The Mobius Backpack starts at $76. Shipping is set to take place in March 2019.
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