What is Bombastic Plastix?

We are a small company that makes fun products by directly  reutilizing HDPE plastic shopping bags.

This is as opposed to recycling which means the plastic must reenter the industrial stream be sorted, ground up, reprocessed, remelted, redyed,and remanufactured into new products. All of which we very much support by the way, cheers to the folks that do all that. We just skip a few of the “re’s”. We take a plastic bag from the trash melt it together with other plastic bags making non-woven fabric and sew the fabric it into stuff. Our process using washing machines, platen presses, irons,sewing machines and hands uses a lot less energy (at least of the fossil fuel variety!) and can be adapted to home industry around the planet. (We hope!) It also allows us greater creative freedom to make really hip designs in short run production. We dig it. If you want to read the longer story, it follows below.

The Long Story

I guess it started in a dusty town in Bolivia. There was a a chain link fence about five miles long and the bus was traveling down the road parallel to the fence. The strong Altiplano wind blew in the same direction day after day and that fence had acted like a giant fishing net catching the trash that had been borne there from miles around. The fence was covered in plastic bags. Mile after mile hundreds of thousands of the things had accumulated. I looked at that fence and thought one thing  There must be something you can do with those things. That thought stayed in my mind every time i saw a plastic bag whether littering the countryside or filling a drawer somewhere. Fast forward a decade and world away to Bali.

I am checking out the Make magazine website and there it is- a video for making a messenger bag out of plastic bags. I freaked ! I  searched the Internet found out there were hundreds of links, of course all back to the one video at Make magazine and it’s companion at Etsy. So… not a whole lot of information but it was enough. I ran to the store before it closed bought a five dollar iron rummaged in the kitchen cabinet found some plastic bags and by 3 in the morning..

I came up with this.

The very next day I showed it to my partner Niluh so excited was I. Look! Look! Look what I made! She looked at it, held it in her hand, assessed it’s various qualities and quickly came to a very accurate conclusion. She then gave me THE look I know so well that tells me she thinks “It’s a piece of junk.”

Now you have to put this into context because we were already making some of the finest bags in the world our Moonwater Bags made from vintage Japanese textiles. If you put the P.O.S. next to a Moonwater Bag it is a pretty sharp contrast. Niluh is also 100%+ Balinese and a more naturally skeptical group I have not encountered. If the slogan of of the Sate of Missouri is “Show Me” the slogan of State of Bali would have to be” OK You Showed Me, Now Show Me Again”

So I had to fire up the iron again. This time I took a new approach. I would make the best fabric I could and take it to a competent tailor and see where that got us. A week later it got us one tailor who never wanted to see us again. (The stuff is a little tricky to sew)

And This

Which doesn’t look too bad at first glance. Niluh took a little more notice. Closer inspection will reveal stitching slithering around like an anaconda, a zipper that broke after two days and numerous other QC (Quality Control) variances. No problem. Just refine the production. Well.. ten tailors  and 3 months later we actually had a viable production model. The fabric is slippery and tough. Imagine trying to tie an oil covered beach ball up with string. The tension on the sewing machines had to messed endlessly and most of all a lot of fabric had to be pushed under the needle until the tailors could get used to the new material. Meanwhile we of course are trying to ramp up production of the actual fabric. It’s simple. You take from 4 to 8 layers of plastic, orienting any ink printed surfaces toward inward. Using a protective non stick protective layer between the plastic and an iron. Iron the stuff up at about 325 F and if you are careful the plastic magically fuses. It also shrinks in four directions, spontaneously sprouts holes, stiffens to unworkable if too much heat is applied and will at times mysteriously delaminate after a few minutes for no discernible reason. Once again it takes time. After a few hundred hours you finally get so you know when it’s right. It was when we got to this point that things really started coming together for us. After being amused by my flailing about finally got Niluh fully into the project Thank God  Can’t do it without her. Girl got really into the design of the fabrics from a chick point of view with her studied Balinese refinement of the designs. Also just flat out threw down the organized stuff. I started discovering the color luminosity/saturation  potential of the fabric by layering different colors popping the spectrum up up and away  and messing with some streety stuff,  rigging up a CNC computer cutter to stencil out the plastic- get em up!  YO! Team Idrawati/Miller started winnin’ the plastic game- woooohoooooo!!!

That’s where we are now.

And this is the result
A Cool Product