Jiahui Li

"Plastic Pollution"

Section MS6, Ifor Duncan

Keywords: environment, materials, design, consumption, mundane

I will focus on the situation how the plastic pollution is serious, which I need to know what the suitable method is to reuse plastic. Because more and more people pay more attention on environment friendly especially recycle resources are important for future development in environment protection. Meantime, I realise that people prefer to recycle plastic, producing plastic need to consumes a lot of resources and produces toxic chemicals. But over the last few years, it has become increasingly clear that people can not recycle themselves out of their current plastic problem.

The most common (eco) canvas fabrics are (organic) cotton and linen, although historically speaking canvas used to be made of hemp. Canvas tote bags are usually produced of one of the first two materials. The beauty of canvas fabrics is that unlike single-use bags, canvas bags can be used countless of times and can carry around 5 times as much as conventional plastic bags. They can be also cleaned if dirty or patched if torn and can be rendered as good as new. Also, they are decomposable and arenā€™t lingering hundreds of years in our landfills or oceans. This is why, canvas tote bags have been touted as a greener alternative to plastic grocery bags.1

I tried to use different types of plastic to design new plastic bags, which could reuse plastic being different colour. Besides, The combination of hard plastic and soft plastic can design different kinds of bags, such as cross-body bags and mini handbags.

According this material information, I cut many plastic trips from Shopping bags and kitchen trash bags, which could reuse plastic bags and provide soft plastic trips for designing. And the hard plastic coming from fruit box could collide with soft plastic in material. Besides, different colours plastic means that colour could make plastic have more choice of styles and be more fashion. Importantly, fruit box belongs to PS, kitchen trash bags belong to PET and shopping bags belongs to LDPE. These types of plastics are hard to recycle. If these plastics could reuse, it would attract people to keep using new designing plastic bags.

Using different kinds of weaving method could design unique plastic pattern, which forms different styles of plastic bags.

The yellow and green bag made by hand loomed weaving method is easier to combine two different colour plastics and have stable structure, therefore, this bag looks like a small storage bag by the bed for some small things.

Black bag that uses hand knotted weaving needed to divided the two parts: Front and back of the bag, then through making hand knotted, it combines this two parts. Besides, hand knotted weaving method looks disordered but it is knitted in a fixed order. Tassel on the bag can increase the fashion sense of the bag.

Another one is transparent, which is Regular Crossbody Bag that combines two same fruit boxes and constitute with soft plastic trips.


  1. Greene, P., 2019. Is Canvas Fabric Eco-Friendly?, s.l.: Tote Bags - Drawstring Bags / BLOG.