waste recycled in barcelona

We love to go a bit crazy sometimes, specially when making one of a kind items. Our over sized logo poufs are available for rent to fill your chill out event with cool furniture. If you wish to have your logo made just send us an email and we will send you a quoation.

Our friends at Fashionlineproductions have prepared a fresh video look with some our our WASTE bags.

Enjoy…

Thank you Pere Cabanyes for thinking about us.

Building one of our bags requires some special ingredients. Discarded head and arm rests, seatbelts and rubber straps just to mention a few.
Unstitching and working on them manually, combining colours and materials to achieve the perfect look.
Then we take them to the local prison in Barcelona where they are stitched.
This work just makes each WASTE bag unique.

The word weiji –crisis in Mandarin- is a sum of two, danger and opportunity. Paradoxically, our western society is capable of stigmatizing itself with danger rather than taking advantage from opportunity. The opportunity to behave differently, to open reality to a new experience. For instance, taking time to stop while walking in the city and observing our surroundings. We may then imagine a different life cycle of the objects which compose such a punctual scenery…

This is the proposal of WASTE.
Direct recycling of car discarded textile. A creative transformation of waste into brand new accessories, following an eco-friendly systemic approach. Indeed, to throw away discarded car leather is two times environmentally unfriendly: first, because chrome coming from industrially tanned leather is polluting the ground and air with heavy metals; second because discarded leather needs to be replaced with new production. And that comes with a heavy bill for the environment. Direct recycling in WASTE’s products emerges from this awareness that such unsustainable consumption pattern of the fashion and car industries needs to be reversed.

Indeed, car upholstery consumes an average of 10m2 leather per car. 45% of which is discarded. Replacing this discarded leather with a new product is double counting on the consumption of energy, raw materials and chemical products. And on the impact on the environment.

WASTE breaks this vicious circle proposing fashion and recycling. Let’s take an average surface of 0,7m2 of direct recycled leather per bag. And let’s analyse the life cycle of leather with a round number of 5m2. This means –on average- 7 bags.

For each 5m2 recycled, 1.25 cows will not need to be fed, avoiding consuming 13.000 litres of water, and the emission of 28.5 tons of CO2. The skin of cows enters then an industrial process to come to the final chromed-tanned leather: skin washing and curing, piling and chrome tanning. These processes consume a total of 7,4 kWh, 50MJ, 550 of drinking water and 9 kg of chrome, per 5m2 of finished leather. Then, 525 l of liquid waste water and 22 kg of solid waste are produced and need to be treated. This treatment allows recovering 1.2 kg of chrome, but with the price of having again to treat 520 l of waste water and 15 kg of toxic mud for final rehearsal. For each 5m2 of discarded leather, the same consumptive pattern resumes…
WASTE direct recycling is a systemic solution. Wearing a direct recycled bag is wearing a positive shadowed ecological footprint. It also means betting for innovative new ways of life, where visual and ideological expectations combine. The opportunity is now.

For further information please contact:
Driss Ezzine de Blas
ezzine@cirad.fr

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Our friend Marcel is the creator of Amanito, your unfaithful friend.
A while ago, he set up an exhibiton at the Ras Gallery in Barcelona, where friends from different fields were ask to reinterpret the little figure to be auction in an event that was name as Amanito Tunning.
At Waste, we decided to take the little figure and customize it into a human size teddy bear.
You can hug and sit on it.

This is a video of the event.

amanito from tendenciastv on Vimeo.

Celebrating the fact that our e-shop is finally up and working, we have
gone along and created a Promo video presenting our new line of WASTE
handbags.

Shot by Pablo Diez and music from WORLD PARTY.

We have just installed this blog in order to help us talk about our products and upcoming events that happen, it’s a community blog, so you can join and talk about topics we post up, don’t be afraid, it’s really simple, we use the BuddyPress system that allows us to not just talk TO you, but talk WITH you about things you find interesting!