Bottle Cap

A 5 Panel Hat made from up-cycled plastic takeaway bags.

Research & Strategy

  • Plastic waste and production are well-known contributors to environmental impact and product waste.

  • This research was intended to find ways of using post-consumer waste from an industrial design perspective.

  • Globally only around 9% of all plastics are recycled - with the vast majority of single-use consumer plastic going to the landfill or incinerated

  • This research defined what plastic was being missed in the recycling process and what of that group could be up-cycled into a product as a means of mitigating the plastic waste stream.

Ideation

  • After my market research I found that plastic #2,5 and 6 on the RIC code were the most used and least recycled.

  • There is a growing trend in the DIY space to iron plastic bags into rough sheets for arts and crafts. I moved forward with refining that process to produce a higher quality non-woven fabric from plastic bags (RIC #2).

  • With an already defined outdoor and environmental community that purchases 5-panel hats, I then developed a mood board and aesthetic directions for Bottle Cap.

Final Direction

  • Once the final direction was defined, I produced a tech pack with call-outs, technical patterns, assembly, and a diagram of the fabric-making process.

Prototyping

  • After several test batches, I pinpointed a process for efficiently cutting sheets from each bag, removing the logos through an acetone bath, dying, and fusing the sheets with a heat press.

  • This video demonstrates each step I developed to produce the final sheets used in the hat.

  • After processing around 40 bags, I was able to yield 6 sheets of fabric, with each sheet using 4 layers of bags.

  • Those sheets were then cut into the patterns and sewn into a prototype bottle cap.

  • The first prototype proved to function surprisingly well as fabric and has reasonable durability in addition to water resistance.

  • This project is in continuous development. The next batches will test texturing, color control, and variations of the fabric, such as woven and meshed.