What's inside our handbags?
From drinks bottles to silky soft handbag lining
If you know anything at all about Vuxari, hopefully it will be that we are a cruelty-free and sustainable brand. Sustainability is very important to us and we achieve this in our products by using recycled and environmentally friendly materials.
Ok, so that is all very well but I bet you’ve wondered at some point HOW are these materials made? How do we turn plastic bottles into our silky soft handbag lining? Well, wonder no more!
So first things first.
Why is recycled better than virgin polyester? Polyester is made from coal, petroleum derivatives and water. These resources are combined under high heat to form polyester. Ok so it’s a little more complicated than that but that is the gist! This is damaging to the environment in a number of ways, coal extraction and petroleum extraction to name just two.
Plastic bottles have already undergone all of these processes so why make more damaging plastic when we already have a seemingly infinite resource to recycle!
Turning plastic into fabric. So, the first step is sourcing the plastic. As you can imagine, this isn’t particularly difficult!
Next the plastic is washed and shredded into small flakes by a machine. These small flakes are melted into a thick sap-like liquid and purified using a series of filters.
This sap-like liquid is forced through tiny holes in a suspended ceramic plate. As the molten plastic is pushed through these holes it forms thin fibres which cool as they hit the air. The cermaic plates are suspended high in the air so that long fibres can form. It’s pretty cool seeing the fibres form as they dangle in the air! These threads are 5 times finer than a human hair!
These fibres are spun into threads that resemble very thin dental floss. Obviously, we couldn’t achieve silky softness with dental floss so the thread is blasted with air to realign the fibres so that it has a more wool-like texture. After a number of quality and strength checks the threads are ready to be woven into handbag lining! Super cool!
This isn’t something that we do to just sell bags. This is an intrinsic value that has been deeply engrained in me from the word go. Having spent a long time studying the natural environment, being ethical in our processes is very important to me. As you may know we fought long and hard to be able to deliver the most eco-friendly handbags we possibly could and we are bloody proud of the results!