Life saver: Coat turns into a warm and cosy sleeping bag
A charity in Detroit – the traditional home of the US automotive industry – has found a novel use for scrap material generated by one of the giants of the sector, General Motors.
The Empowerment Plan organisation has used offcuts of a sound-absorbing material called Sonozorb as insulation in an ingenious product intended to help save the lives of homeless people sleeping rough on the streets – a warm, waterproof coat that can be turned into a sleeping bag.
Megan Stojcevski, development director for the charity, said the idea for the product originated three years ago with the organisation’s founder and chief executive Veronika Scott, who at the time was a student at the city’s College for Creative Studies.
Stojcevski said Scott visited shelters for homeless people in Detroit and thought that a relatively cheap but robust and versatile combined product of that sort could find wide use. Scott not only designed the product but also set about finding inexpensive, ideally free, but also effective and environmentally-friendly materials that could be used to make it. The outer surface, for instance, uses scrap materials left over from the operations of a commercial workwear manufacturer in the city called Carhartt.
The warmth of the product was initially provided by a paper-based lining derived from a material used to cover hoardings on building sites. However after Scott made contact with John Bradburn, the director of waste reduction for GM, she identified Sonozorb as an ideal and superior alternative.
The polymer material, which originates with a supplier to GM called GDC, is normally used to help ensure a quiet ride for occupants of the carmaker’s Chevrolet Malibu and Buick Verano sedans.
With GM now embarked on a worldwide drive to reduce the amount of waste materials it sends to landfill by finding opportunities for the recycling or reuse of what would otherwise be scrap there was an obvious mutual beneficial opportunity for both parties. After making an initial donation of enough of the material to make 400 of the coats/sleeping bags, GM has now made the arrangement more permanent. It therefore sends all its offcuts back to GDC which reprocesses them before sending them on to the Empowerment Plan.
The charity, though, has done more to benefit homeless people than simply provide the combined coat/sleeping bag. It has also recruited homeless women from a shelter in Detroit and now employs nine of them to make the product.
Stojcevski said that the organisation made 2,000 of the items in 2012 but aims to double that output this year with sales – they cost $100 each – being made to other organisations aiding the homeless in the US. Some 300 have been purchased for use in Chicago.
The charity is now aiming not just to make use of scrap materials from mainstream manufacturing but also to employ some state-of-the-art technology of its own to support its work. Stojcevski said that plans are being formulated to buy a CAD system and a 3D printer so that the charity can design and make buckles and fasteners for the products.