I had the opportunity to ask Tom Larsen from Act 2 – Green Smart a few questions about his business, thoughts on the environment, and even college sports.  His answers are really interesting.

1. What inspired you to start making bags out of recycled plastic? What kind of research/learning process did you have to go through to go from the idea stage to making it happen?

My wife and business partner was the inspiration. In December of 2005 she asked me whether or not I thought there was yet developed a supply for “green materials” for bags that was parallel to the developments that she was seeing in the apparel markets through her readings of Yoga magazines and such.

As a result of my research and efforts, I found an emerging supplier in Taiwan that was far ahead of the U.S. or other Asian suppliers of rPET polyester. Of course, to determine that, I had to get myself a quick education on the state of the art of fabric making and raw material sourcing, etc. It was interesting. Most bags any of us buy at the store only have a material specification, not a selected vendor. They are designed somewhere and then handed to a Chinese supplier (well over 90% of ALL bags are made in China, now), which then shops their traditional fabric suppliers for the best price on say “nylon” or “neoprene”. The quality of the fabrics is so high now that the fabrics are often just commodities allowing suppliers to simply shop their known sources.

To find our supply, we had to go past the fabric and certify the origin of the bottles, the work done in creating the yarn and the final weaving of the fabric, too. It entails lots of questions, from different viewpoints to test the integrity of the suppliers. Thankfully, I studied this type of questioning at U.C. Berkeley, so knowing what to ask is not hard for me. But, were it not for Debbie, I likely would not have realized the time to transform was then.

2. Where do the bottles come from?

Our supply chain is pretty local. The bottles that become our fabrics come almost exclusively from Japan, a relatively short 1400 miles via ocean from Taiwan, a shorter distance than Chicago to San Francisco. And traveling most of the distance by ocean is from what I’ve read about the most efficient method of transportation. In Taiwan the bottles are spun into yarn and woven into fabric, which is then off on another sailing only 600 miles this time to fabrication in China. All told, from raw materials to finished bag, the bottles have only traveled about 2000 miles. About the distance from Los Angeles to Nashville, not even coast to coast in the U.S. At that point, the finished bags are shipped to Europe or North America, again via efficient ocean freight, to wherever they are destined.

Research conducted by Patagonia, puts transportation at only 1% of the total carbon footprint of the products it makes, which are literally woven fabrics, cut and sewn into garments not bags. The greenest thing we can do is to continually utilize existing facilities to make stuff. When we use existing facilities, we’re doing two things; 1. We’re not purchasing new equipment, displacing existing workers, using new land for development, etc. and 2. We’re taking space away from traditional materials in the supply chain. To me, it’s a huge victory for green to embed itself in existing supply and distribution systems, not an “alternate” path. Without any real cut and sew industry in the U.S. it would be silly to source bottles in the U.S. to ship to Taiwan and then China to send back here.

3. Obviously, we have to factor in the energy used in the recycling process, but what is the over all energy savings of using fabric made from recycled bottles instead of fabric made from new materials?

This doesn’t have to be complicated so I’ll use an example that may be more obvious. When we recycle paper and the papers get ground up into fibers and put back into pulp to become a new piece of paper, no new wood fiber or trees were cut down to make the new paper so all that energy in the forest and at the mill is still in the fibers recycled. In the case of the bottles, the petroleum has already been converted to plastic. That takes a great deal of energy. By grinding up the bottles, the petroleum energy that has been transformed into the bottles is retained, just like retaining the fibers in the paper, so that the energy expended is no greater than the last couple of steps of conversion from bottles  to yarn. The chemistry for PET and for polyester is the same chemistry, just like the content of the paper and the content of a 2 by 4 are the same chemistry. Every product we sell and every product on our website shows the actual savings of energy by using a recycled resource instead of a virgin one. Not only do we relieve landfill, consume a currently replenishable resource, but, we use less energy in making the fabric from recycled material than from virgin petroleum.

4. How many bottles go into the average act2 bag?

Our website documents this pretty clearly for every different bag. Each bag uses a different amount of fabric and therefore has a different consumption of bottles. The conversion we use is for 16 oz. bottles. Each square foot of fabric uses somewhere between 1 to 1.5 of these size bottles. The range is because heavier fabrics use more materials than lighter weight fabrics.

5. The act2 tote bag I’ve been trying out is really well designed. It fits a ton of stuff, but works really well for carrying just a few things too. Who designs your bags? Do you have any new products on the horizon?

Thank you, I’m glad it works for you. Every product is a collaboration for us. We don’t have a designer per se, so we go into the market, talk to consumers, listen to sales people and retailers, use products ourselves and come up with what we think is a successful bag from a functionality point of view. To this day, there is still no supplier offering a zip open back door on a laptop sleeve that we introduced in 1997, yet, consumers love it. Go figure.

As for the future, we’ve recently introduced a pair of lightweight briefs and in the spring we expect to be out with lunch bags or food carrying systems, whichever you prefer to call them.

6. I’ve heard some environmentalists voice concerns that recycled plastic products don’t solve the plastic problem, and possibly teach people that it’s okay to use plastic because it will just be made into something else later. Can you address this concern? Is buying recycled plastic products a part of the solution, or just a way to appease our conscience?

This is a great question and one I’ve wrestled with periodically. I agree with the perspective that no plastic problem is solved by transforming it into a different product. On the other hand, we can make identical polyester fibers from a recycled supply stream that at present seems endless. I can choose to shake my finger at the plastics industry for making the material or the consumer for buying the bottles, but, that doesn’t accomplish much and still leaves a billion bottles a day going to landfill. I choose instead to take a pragmatist approach. As a distributor in Russia told me after seeing and handling one of our bags, “you make this from trash?” And why not. That’s one less bag that someone buys made from virgin nylon, which produces twice the carbon footprint of our rPET polyester. So every time someone buys our bag instead of virgin nylon, bottles come out of landfill and the carbon footprint of our bag is way better than the alternative.

To me, since the consumer is going to buy a bag anyway, why not allow them to make progress.
It’s the same for Patagonia or Timberland, if we offer competitively priced, comparable quality products that produce less, sometimes way less negative outcomes, we should jump on it. We choose to look for Best Available Practices as our standard, which just about always should provide a better eco footprint than the existing alternatives. We’ll leave the future Practices to our business later. In the meantime, I want to see action. I’m an action kind of guy in the marketplace.

7. Your products are manufactured in China. Are there any plans to move your manufacturing facilities to the United States? With the recent product recalls from China, what are you doing to ensure your bags remain safe?

We have a very strong relationship with our supply chain in China and Taiwan. We know what’s going on there. The only work actually performed in China is to cut and sew a bunch of things together so there is no risk of anything hazardous happening at that step of the process. It’s not inherently very dangerous. Making and dyeing the fabric is potentially much worse. Most people don’t realize that It takes 800 to 3000 gallons of water to make 1 pound of denim, so the opportunities for contamination, both locally in the production and the resulting residues in the fabrics are much greater at the dyeing/weaving stage.

Our Taiwan supply chain, with our encouragement, has just accomplished bluesign certification which demonstrates an ongoing commitment to improve beyond the practices they currently utilize. We can audit payroll, ask about employee health, etc., but, what really takes the partnership to a different level is the willingness to buy in to the concept because of a philosophical or an eco-conscious alignment. This type of cohesion is what brings about change on a large, large scale, not just to placate a customer or two.

8. What green practices do you maintain at home?

We only have one vehicle for the two of us. We’re pretty diligent recyclers. We grow a percentage of our own food and have a compost pile. We wear our clothes a long, long time. We change the lightbulbs to higher efficiency as they burn out. We purchase Climate Smart electricity from PGandE. We’re members of our local Co-op. We don’t buy bottled water. We go out of our way to reuse or repurpose whatever we’re done with. In fact, I recently built in storage for our garage with cabinetry all purchased from Habitat for Humanity which is used stuff, so it was all repurposed from someone else’s bathroom or kitchen to our garage.

Most people don’t realize that a lot of green principles are also cost savers, too. We have one less car, which takes a little coordination here and there, but, we spend less on the purchase, the insurance and the registration. We likely drive about 25% less overall as a result, too, so that saves gas and oil, etc. We’re all just so focused on the convenience of having a personal metal transportation system, that we don’t even think about the options available.

9. What do you think is the most important thing the average person can do to lessen their negative impact on the environment?

Become eco-conscious. Once someone is eco-conscious, it is much easier to take some action to make better decisions. It’s not unlike eating and health. If you want to eat better, you need to learn what’s good and what’s bad. There are labels and other ways to do that. For our personal environmental impact, there’s almost nothing. Few people will break from old practices or develop a new discipline just because they heard about. Very few people go to the store one day and just decide to start buying organic or local food without having learned something first that compelled them to reconsider their practice. We’re all human and have developed our own habits, practices and understandings. Education, or enlightenment and sometimes fear, all stemming from information, is what compels humans to action. Learn something, make any change as a result of the learning. Learn some more. Change some more. Continue to repeat.
This is the reason I wrote the GreenSmart Glossary; so folks would have somewhere to go to get an objective and two perspective viewpoint on all kinds of things. Everyone needs their own entry point to education. Is it organic foods? Is it buy local? Is it recycling? Is it car pooling? Is it a hybrid vehicle? Is it refilling an existing water bottle? What about buying recycled paper only? It’s very easy for those of us fortunate enough to already observe the choices to forget that there was a point where we didn’t see the choices we had. Our goal, apparently my lifelong project, is to continually illuminate the choices people have, so that more people will reconsider something. We don’t know what the carrying capacity of the earth is for quantity of humans, so I say, rather than test it, let’s work to accommodate it; a lighter footprint wherever we can. That’s why I call it eco-conscious.

10. So, I hear you played football in college . . .

You’ll be surprised to know that actually I played soccer. I was an all-conference goal-keeper at College of Marin. It’s called football about everywhere around the world except here. Now, I’m a pretty big college football fan. I love the pageantry and history. I was in the Marching Band at Cal, so the full spectrum of game day Saturday in this Country is pretty darn cool and I can’t get enough of it.

Check out Tom’s Blog, and the Act 2 website for more information on Act 2 – Green Smart’s products and processes.

And leave a comment below to get a second entry in the Act 2 – Green Smart giveaway.