If you read already everything you could on Buy Nothing Day and Black Friday and you're looking for something that is combining the two in a way, we got something for you. It's called bookBags.I found bookBags on the Alternative Consumer and fell in love with it immediately. BookBag is a handcrafted purse custom made from recycled legal book covers. BookBags according to their website is "an ecofriendly, aggressively green manufacturer of fashionable purses, handbags and clutches" and it "was founded by a law librarian, who needed to find a better way to recycle continually updated legal books."
Kathy Kelly, the founder, told Ecoterrarist.org in an interview that "“legal books are constantly updated and replaced and most of them have no distributional value... About 2 years ago, I returned to work, and came back to a pile of mail that included volumes of updates. One update included 9 volumes of gorgeous maroon leather-like material, the United States Code Annoted.I knew I had to remove the cover to recycle the paper of the book, if I could find a recycler to take them, but it still seemed like such a waste of such a beautiful material (and still created plenty of garbage). For a month or two I was collecting the book covers with no idea what I was going to do with them. I just knew I had to figure something out.”
As you can already see, most of the books Kelly uses are outdated legal books. She gets them from the Erie County Law Library, as well as from three of the biggest law firms in Erie and many smaller firms that also recycle their books through BookBags. She reports on the website that so far this year she has recycled over 7,000 pounds of paper.
Each Bookbag is carefully handcrafted to the highest quality. I find it a great combination of recycling with eco-fashion, or in other words creating a beautiful product responsibly and sustainably. So wouldn't you say it can be the perfect example for responsible consumerism, which can be the best way to balance between zero consumerism and over-consumerism?You're welcome to check out the bookBags at bookbags.us.com
Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris
Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!
