Illustration by Nick Dewar Melting down used plastic to make the next hipster tote.
In a lonesome San Francisco alleyway, a newly minted Stanford grad and the CEO of one of the city's last manufacturing plants huddle over a strange contraption. There's a hint of burning plastic in the air coming from, well, burning plastic. The two men are feeding shopping bags from Chinatown dime stores and Haight Street boutiques into a smoking machine that has an exposed integrated circuit board bolted to its side. On the front end, a hand-punched label reads Lamitron. Brian Witlin, the budding entrepreneur, points an infrared temperature gauge into the machine's smoky maw; it reads 467 degrees. "Too hot," he mutters.
Just then, a fuse blows and everything stops. "Obviously," says Perry Klebahn, who runs the popular messenger-bag maker Timbuk2, "we're still in the prototype stage." When the power surges back, the machine beeps, and the small crowd in the alley cheers. We're ready to burn.
The goal here is to turn recyclables into chic laptop and messenger bags. Witlin, 28, hatched the idea at Stanford's Institute of Design (where Klebahn doubles as a professor). By heating polyethylene bags just enough to fuse them together, he creates a tough, flexible material that he hopes will become a stand-in for Cordura or canvas. Using specs from Timbuk2, he built a $100 machine to make 8-foot-long sheets of the stuff, suitable for cutting and sewing. Lamitron 1.0 may be crude, ugly, and potentially flammable, but it works. "Innovation is not a clean sport," Klebahn says.
The finished totes look super cool, in a battered, Blade Runner sort of way. They bear the brands of whatever plastic bag or film was last fed into the Lamitron — some batches have logos from the San Francisco Chronicle, United Airlines, Apple, and Evian. Another has two side panels from Wal-Mart and a center section festooned with a familiar pattern of red concentric circles. Klebahn envisions a day when customers can send in old shopping bags or plastic wrap from anywhere in the world and receive a custom-made Timbuk2 a few weeks later. But for now, the process is too labor-intensive for mass-market production. Timbuk2 can make only a handful of Lamitron bags on any given day — far fewer than the 450 or so Cordura or ballistic nylon totes it typically cranks out. But that's OK, Klebahn says: Hipsters love limited editions; the masses will follow.
Back in the alley, Witlin arranges at least 50 bags between protective layers of ripstop nylon and feeds the sheaf into the Lamitron. The machine is acting up again. Just standing near it looks like a good way to end up in the burn unit. As it emerges from the back end, the plastic sheet gets stuck and begins to spool back on itself. Klebahn braces his boot on the contraption and yanks. Someone makes a joke about the dangers of working around farm equipment. There's the problem: The high-temperature silicon covering the bar rollers has melted and is now squishing out of the machine in a limp ruin. Witlin cuts the power. Clearly, some adjustments need to be made.
In the meantime, a handful of trendsetters will get the exclusive totes — at least until some trademark holder objects. And Witlin, who's already at work on a commercial-scale Lamitron 2.0, will go on gathering raw materials from trash bins and dumpsters, one bag at a time.
