The Daily Excess - LooptWorks

As it marks a banner first quarter, Portland’s Looptworks continues to keep some pretty heady company.

The upcycling apparel maker will supply material for T-shirts for the Dave Matthews Band’s summer tour. The Matthews outfit is one of the world’s top music attractions, selling 1.27 million concert tickets — and presumably selling reams of T-shirts — in 2010.

Looptworks will deliver each of the official tour shirts, said Scott Hamlin, Looptworks’ co-founder. “We got hooked up with them and the band liked what we’re doing,” Hamlin said.

Read the rest of this article from Sustainable Business Oregon, here.

We are proud to announce that LOOPTWORKS has been chosen for the second year in a row to produce the Microsoft TechEd conference backpack for 2013 event attendees.

By upcycling this years bag, Microsoft TechEd and LOOPTWORKS have conserved an astounding 729,600 gallons of fresh water – saving an approximate 48 gallons of water per bag. Check out the pics above!

Bag Features:

1. TSA checkpoint friendly butterfly fold rear laptop (padded) compartment with opposing cord and accessory pocketing.
2. Padded handle tested for 50lb weight load.
3. Durable rip stop exterior.
4. Two front zip pockets with interior organization. Left side mesh water bottle pocket, and optional quick access right side pocket for papers, phone or keys.
5. Right side attachment strip (where you will find this years bottle opener) – designed for post conference use.
6. Per bag conservation numbers: 48 gallons of water, 71% carbon emissions, 2.4 yards of physical waste.

To read the full article, click here.

LOOPTWORKS’ TABLET CASES 
looptworks.com

WHO The Portland-based “up-cycling” company, founded 2009, makes apparel and accessories out of material discarded at overseas textile factories.,

WHAT In November 2011, one of the world’s largest leather tannery companies told Looptworks founder Scott Hamlin it tossed 4,500 pounds of leather every day in Vietnam and China. Solution: turn the refuse into stitched slipcases for iPads and other digital tablets, retailing for up to $80.

WHY One Looptworks case requires 4,000 fewer gallons of water to produce than a similar product made with fresh material. So far, the company has sold several thousand.

HOW “This tannery company sells to all the big guys here,” Hamlin says. “They heard about us through the press, but had a sales agent here because of the strength of Portland’s apparel industry.” —ZD

Read the full article and learn about the 24 other Portlanders who are CHANGING THE WORLD!

UPCYCLING • MARCH 10, 2013 • BY: DAVID HERRON

Maybe you recycle your heart out and have excised the word trash from your vocabulary, but does that mean you aren’t sending anything to the landfill? How could that be, if you’re a perfect recycler who can put everything into the recycling bin, that you could still be sending stuff to the landfill? What about “pre-consumer waste”? That’s the waste you do not see, because it is generated for you before you buy any product. Pre-consumer “waste” is the excess material thrown away by factory workers. Often that material is perfectly usable, and upcycling aims to put a use to this material.

An example of an upcycling company is Looptworks. We had the opportunity to hear Scott Hamlin, CEO of Looptworks, speak at the recent GreenBiz conference in San Francisco. His personal background was in the traditional clothing manufacturing industry, until he got fed up with the rampant waste and quit his job vowing to find a better way to do it.

According to Hamlin, the average garment factory throws away 60,000 pounds of perfectly good usable material every week. This is things like thread, buttons, zippers, fabric, all of which is simply left over after a production run. This perfectly good material could be made into clothing but for a variety of reasons cannot be used for the purpose for which it was bought. Maybe the designer changed the design, or any of a thousand other reasons.

Upcycling is the process of converting what would be waste materials, or useless products, into some other useful product.

To put this into context consider a couple Permaculture principles:

• Produce no waste
• Use and value renewables
• Turn problems into solutions

The problem was the “waste” Hamlin saw being produced. The solution he developed was to create a company, Looptworks, that “rescues” the perfectly good materials garment factories would otherwise throw away, and instead make clothing with those materials.

Along the way Looptworks had to change the words used to describe these materials. Instead of calling it “waste” material, they call it “excess” material, because the word “waste” has the wrong meaning for their purpose.

The result is a business whose purpose is to solve the problem of excess (“waste”) materials at garment factories. By doing so they create an almost renewable system.

This is important because of the quantity of virgin material consumed in manufacturing clothing. Looptworks estimates that 15% of all fabric ends up on the cutting room floor, 85% of which ends up in landfills, adding up to a million tons of material a year.

They manufacture a variety of clothing and “gear” (laptop sleeves, backpacks, etc). The Looptworks products can be bought either via their website, or through a partner store.

See: http://www.looptworks.com/

By Becky Hollady

If you’ve got a glass of water sitting in front of you right now, padlock it and keep an eye out for thieves — it’s stock just went way, way up. 

Somewhere in space, about 40 light years away, there’s a planet twice the size of earth made entirely of diamond. Ridiculously valuable, largely sought after diamond. Keeping up with the slew of strange celebrity baby names, astronomers have dubbed the planet ’55 cancri e’ — a sciene-y reference to its physical location in the cancer constellation and its distance from its parent star 55 cancri A.

(Here’s a great huffington post article with even more info on 55 cancri e)

It’s not the first of its kind to be discovered but it is most certainly the largest and therefore the most valuable. In fact, this is the figure my ATM receipt will reflect when 55 cancri e is mine:

$26,9000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.00

That’s $26.9 NONILLION USD. If that denomination doesn’t sound familiar to you it’s because there’s not often a thing that exists in such a high quantity. To put it into perspective; if you laid out 26.9 nonillion $1 bills over the entire surface of the earth, you would cover the planet in a layer of money 324 million miles thick. It’s an essentially infathomable amount.

As long as I don’t go too crazy, I’ll be set forever — which is how long I’ll live because I’ll be able to buy immortality. However, in my greed I can’t help but wonder if there’s a smarter investment out there; something even more in-demand and maybe a little closer to home.

The answer was right in front of my face. And then in my mouth. It’s water guys!

Literally, figuratively, and absolutely the most valuable thing that exists to humankind is water. You could argue that what makes diamond so valuable is its rarity and you would be correct. But an entire planet, twice the size of earth, made of diamond — not so rare anymore.

Now consider our planet; the size of…earth with about 71% of its mass covered in water. Oh yeah, and it’s the only place we’ve found that this ‘life force’ occurs in an accessible liquid form. Like ever, anywhere and we’ve really been looking hard.

I’m sure you remember that without water, a human being can only live about a week. If you’re not alive, diamonds most likely won’t be that appealing to you. Not to mention the fact that we can’t even make the machines that make the other machines that make harvesting diamonds or even getting to 55 cancri e possible without H2O. And those workers will need food. Food can’t exist without water. Plants, cows, frogs, whatever you like.

So why waste it?

It’s easily our greatest resource but more than anything, it’s our most treasured commodity. We don’t have enough of it to be casual about how and when we choose to use it; it’s not as common as say, diamond.