Two students had an idea at a scrapyard. They went on to "upcycle" 80,000 airbags, 100,000 seatbelts and 28,000 belt buckles – the equivalent of 60 tons of car trash
Luckily, two college freshmen at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, were naïve enough to take their bicycles to the scrapyard. In a previous stroke of fortune, the freshmen, Adrian Goosses and Michael Widmann, had been assigned as roommates and had quickly hit it off. Now they were looking for a cool recycling project for their first semester “strategic entrepreneurship” course—maybe they could turn old tires into comfortable lounge chairs, they thought.
“Everybody gets around by bike in Rotterdam,” says Goosses, now 32, from his home in Cologne, Germany. “The tires were way too heavy and cumbersome to transport by bike,” Widmann chimes in via Zoom from Bolzano, Italy, where he lives.
Sifting through the car trash for something handier led the two students to an idea that has since flourished: Could the airbag and seatbelts from a banged up compact car be salvaged and turned into a sustainable backpack? The size of the airbag was already a natural fit. The seatbelts made perfect shoulder straps. After returning from the scrapyard, “We stitched the prototype together by hand with a needle and yarn,” says Goosses. “Yet we didn’t even know how to sew!”
Much to their surprise, their classmates responded with so much enthusiasm to their “trash bag” concept that it convinced the two innovators to keep going. Every semester, they improved the prototype further. With the help of YouTube videos, they taught themselves how to sew. Because modern electric sewing machines had a difficult time breaking through the tough nylon of the airbags, Goosses and Widmann went to a second-hand shop and purchased an ancient Singer from 1880 for 10 Euros. They dyed the first airbags in a saucepan in the garden outside of the apartment they shared.
“By the time we graduated, we had a presentable prototype and a business plan,” Goosses says.
Despite their progress, Goosses and Widmann are up against a problem that’s immense: Cars are notoriously difficult to recycle because many parts are considered toxic waste.
It’s an example of “upcycling,” when you spot a potential new use in something that’s been trashed, shelved or otherwise retired. The approach has received increasing attention and support from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and others to boost sustainability in all kinds of areas, from fashion (where even luxury brands like Balenciaga or Coach repurpose vintage clothing and bags) to architecture, where reusing wood, steel and bricks significantly reduces a building’s carbon footprint.
In addition to helping the planet, those who do it well can make a living from it. These days, Goosses and Widmann own a flourishing company: Airpaq. A crowdfunding campaign in 2017 yielded 70,000 Euros to get them started. Since then, they have upcycled 80,000 airbags, 100,000 seatbelts and 28,000 belt buckles – the equivalent of 60 tons of car trash.
For the successful upcycling, they received the 2021 German Design Award and, earlier this year, the renowned German Sustainability Award. The jurors evaluating the product commented that the startup “convinced us not only because of their uncompromising quality and functionality but also because of their ecological and ethical values….How well the startup translates upcycling and green fashion into an urban lifestyle brand is impressive.”
Despite their progress, Goosses and Widmann are up against a problem that’s immense: Cars are notoriously difficult to recycle because many parts are considered toxic waste. Therefore, up to 25% of vehicle scraps get shredded every year in Germany alone, the equivalent of over 501,000 tons. Because airbags and seatbelts are nearly indestructible, they are costly to recycle and almost always end up in landfills. Given that airbags and seatbelts save lives, they are subject to stringent security regulations, and manufacturers have a sky-high reject rate. “If a tiny filament protrudes somewhere, the manufacturer will throw out the entire output,” Widmann explains.
The nearly indestructible qualities that make this material very difficult to recycle render it an excellent resource for backpacks. “The material is so durable, you almost cannot tear it,” Goosses adds and demonstrates with a hard tug that even when the material already has a hole, it won’t rip it further. The material is also water repellent and extremely light.
The antique Singer is still in their Cologne headquarters but only as decoration. Their company with 12 employees is producing 500 backpacks and fanny packs every week in Romania, where the parts are professionally cut by laser, dyed and sewed. Airpaq still procures the belt buckles at scrapyards but they get most of the airbags directly from the reject pile of a nearby airbag producer. “We process the materials where they are produced,” Goosses explains. Only about 15 miles lie between one of Europe’s biggest airbag manufacturers and the Airpaq seamsters in Romania.
Co-founders Adrian Goosses and Michael Widmann demonstrate their company's equation: airbag plus seatbelt equals a backpack that's durable and eco-friendly.
Airpaq
The founders are aware that with price tags ranging from 100 to 160 Euro - a cost that reflects their intensive production process - Airpaq’s bags are hardly competitive. After all, anybody can buy a discount backpack for a fraction of the cost. So they recently added fanny packs for 30 Euro to their product line. Goosses and Widmann know they will need to lower their prices in the long run if they want to expand. Among other things, they didn’t pay themselves salaries during the first two years after founding the company.
Money-making isn’t their only objective. “Of course, it would be cheaper if we did what almost all textile producers do and move production to Asia,” Goosses says. That wasn’t an option for him. “Ship trash to Vietnam and let seamsters sew it together for cheap? No way, that would be anything but sustainable,” he says.
Michael Widmann’s family was already operating a textile production in Romania, mainly producing thin, elastic sports fashion. The family allowed Widmann and Goosses to produce their first professional prototypes there, but then the two youngsters had to buy their own machines, acquire the necessary knowhow, and hire their staff. They both moved to Romania for six months “to get to know the people behind the machines.” The founders emphasize that they pay fair wages, use eco-certified dyes and clean their own wastewater. “Normal production uses five to six liters of water per kilo material,” Widmann explains. “We only need a fraction because we massage the dye into the material by hand: 100 ml water for washing and dying per kilo.”
However, every time they return to the scrapyard, the abundance of trash sparks new ideas. “When you see how much material ends up there…” Widmann says, shaking his head without finishing the sentence. Goosses picks up the train of thought: “We want to make upcycling the new standard. You just have to be creative to get upcycling into the mainstream.”
And maybe they’ll return to their roots and finally find an idea for the tires after all. “One could turn the rubber into soles for comfortable shoes,” Widmann thinks out loud.
Sharing land and other resources among farmers isn’t new. But research shows it may be increasingly relevant in a time of climatic upheaval.
Sharing land and other resources among farmers isn’t new. But research shows it may be increasingly relevant in a time of climatic upheaval, potentially influencing “farmers to adopt environmentally friendly practices and agricultural innovation,” according to a 2021 paper in the Journal of Economic Surveys. Farmers might share knowledge about reducing pesticide use, says Heather Frambach, a supply chain consultant who works with farmers in California and elsewhere. As a group they may better qualify for grants to monitor soil and water quality.
Most research around such practices applies to cooperatives, whose owner-members equally share governance and profits. But a collective like Carman Ranch’s — spearheaded by fourth-generation rancher Cory Carman, who purchases beef from eight other ranchers to sell under one “regeneratively” certified brand — shows when producers band together, they can achieve eco-benefits that would be elusive if they worked alone.
Vitamins and minerals in soil pass into plants through their roots, then into cattle as they graze, then back around as the cows walk around pooping.
Carman knows from experience. Taking over her family's land in 2003, she started selling grass-fed beef “because I really wanted to figure out how to not participate in the feedlot world, to have a healthier product. I didn't know how we were going to survive,” she says. Part of her land sits on a degraded portion of Zumwalt Prairie replete with invasive grasses; working to restore it, she thought, “What good does it do to kill myself trying to make this ranch more functional? If you want to make a difference, change has to be more than single entrepreneurs on single pieces of land. It has to happen at a community level.” The seeds of her collective were sown.
Raising 100 percent grass-fed beef requires land that’s got something for cows to graze in every season — which most collective members can’t access individually. So, they move cattle around their various parcels. It’s practical, but it also restores nutrient flows “to the way they used to move, from lowlands and canyons during the winter to higher-up places as the weather gets hot,” Carman says. Meaning, vitamins and minerals in soil pass into plants through their roots, then into cattle as they graze, then back around as the cows walk around pooping.
Cory Carman sells grass-fed beef, which requires land that’s got something for cows to graze in every season.
Courtesy Cory Carman
Each collective member has individual ecological goals: Carman brought in pigs to root out invasive grasses and help natives flourish. Probert also heads a more conventional grain-finished beef collective with 100 members, and their combined 6.5 million ranchland acres were eligible for a grant supporting climate-friendly practices, which compels them to improve soil and water health and biodiversity and make their product “as environmentally friendly as possible,” Probert says. The Washington veg farmer reduced tilling and pesticide use thanks to the ecoservices of visiting cows. Similarly, a conventional hay farmer near Carman has reduced his reliance on fertilizer by letting cattle graze the cover crops he plants on 80 acres.
Additionally, the collective must meet the regenerative standards promised on their label — another way in which they work together to achieve ecological goals. Says David LeZaks, formerly a senior fellow at finance-focused ecology nonprofit Croatan Institute, it’s hard for individual farmers to access monetary assistance. “But it's easier to get financing flowing when you increase the scale with cooperatives or collectives,” he says. “This supports producers in ways that can lead to better outcomes on the landscape.”
New, smaller scale farmers might gain the most from collective and cooperative models.
For example, it can help them minimize waste by using more of an animal, something our frugal ancestors excelled at. Small-scale beef producers normally throw out hides; Thousand Hills’ 50 regenerative beef producers together have enough to sell to Timberland to make carbon-neutral leather. In another example, working collectively resulted in the support of more diverse farms: Meadowlark Community Mill in Wisconsin went from working with one wheat grower, to sourcing from several organic wheat growers marketing flour under one premium brand.
Another example shows how these collaborations can foster greater equity, among other benefits: The Federation of Southern Cooperatives has a mission to support Black farmers as they build community health. It owns several hundred forest acres in Alabama, where it teaches members to steward their own forest land and use it to grow food — one member coop raises goats to graze forest debris and produce milk. Adding the combined acres of member forest land to the Federation’s, the group qualified for a federal conservation grant that will keep this resource available for food production, and community environmental and mental health benefits. “That's the value-add of the collective land-owner structure,” says Dãnia Davy, director of land retention and advocacy.
New, smaller scale farmers might gain the most from collective and cooperative models, says Jordan Treakle, national program coordinator of the National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC). Many of them enter farming specifically to raise healthy food in healthy ways — with organic production, or livestock for soil fertility. With land, equipment and labor prohibitively expensive, farming collectively allows shared costs and risk that buy farmers the time necessary to “build soil fertility and become competitive” in the marketplace, Treakle says. Just keeping them in business is an eco-win; when small farms fail, they tend to get sold for development or absorbed into less-diversified operations, so the effects of their success can “reverberate through the entire local economy.”
Frambach, the supply chain consultant, has been experimenting with what she calls “collaborative crop planning,” where she helps farmers strategize what they’ll plant as a group. “A lot of them grow based on what they hear their neighbor is going to do, and that causes really poor outcomes,” she says. “Nobody replanted cauliflower after the [atmospheric rivers in California] this year and now there's a huge shortage of cauliflower.” A group plan can avoid the under-planting that causes farmers to lose out on revenue.
It helps avoid overplanted crops, too, which small farmers might have to plow under or compost. Larger farmers, conversely, can sell surplus produce into the upcycling market — to Matriark Foods, for example, which turns it into value-add products like pasta sauce for companies like Sysco that supply institutional kitchens at colleges and hospitals. Frambach and Anna Hammond, Matriark’s CEO, want to collectivize smaller farmers so that they can sell to the likes of Matriark and “not lose an incredible amount of income,” Hammond says.
Ultimately, farming is fraught with challenges and even collectivizing doesn’t guarantee that farms will stay in business. But with agriculture accounting for almost 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally, there's an “urgent” need to shift farming practices to more environmentally sustainable models, as well as a “demand in the marketplace for it,” says NFFC’s Treakle. “The growth of cooperative and collective farming can be a huge, huge boon for the ecological integrity of the system.”
How AI changes things
Sure, you would reply, but AI changes everything. With artificial intelligence, the machine itself will develop some sort of autonomy, however ill-defined. It will have a will of its own. And this will, if it reflects anything that seems human, will not be benevolent. With AI, the claim goes, the machine will somehow know what it must do to get rid of us. It will threaten us as a species.
Well, this fear is also not new. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818 to warn us of what science could do if it served the wrong calling. In the case of her novel, Dr. Frankenstein’s call was to win the battle against death — to reverse the course of nature. Granted, any cure of an illness interferes with the normal workings of nature, yet we are justly proud of having developed cures for our ailments, prolonging life and increasing its quality. Science can achieve nothing more noble. What messes things up is when the pursuit of good is confused with that of power. In this distorted scale, the more powerful the better. The ultimate goal is to be as powerful as gods — masters of time, of life and death.
Should countries create a World Mind Organization that controls the technologies that develop AI?
Back to AI, there is no doubt the technology will help us tremendously. We will have better medical diagnostics, better traffic control, better bridge designs, and better pedagogical animations to teach in the classroom and virtually. But we will also have better winnings in the stock market, better war strategies, and better soldiers and remote ways of killing. This grants real power to those who control the best technologies. It increases the take of the winners of wars — those fought with weapons, and those fought with money.
A story as old as civilization
The question is how to move forward. This is where things get interesting and complicated. We hear over and over again that there is an urgent need for safeguards, for controls and legislation to deal with the AI revolution. Great. But if these machines are essentially functioning in a semi-black box of self-teaching neural nets, how exactly are we going to make safeguards that are sure to remain effective? How are we to ensure that the AI, with its unlimited ability to gather data, will not come up with new ways to bypass our safeguards, the same way that people break into safes?
The second question is that of global control. As I wrote before, overseeing new technology is complex. Should countries create a World Mind Organization that controls the technologies that develop AI? If so, how do we organize this planet-wide governing board? Who should be a part of its governing structure? What mechanisms will ensure that governments and private companies do not secretly break the rules, especially when to do so would put the most advanced weapons in the hands of the rule breakers? They will need those, after all, if other actors break the rules as well.
As before, the countries with the best scientists and engineers will have a great advantage. A new international détente will emerge in the molds of the nuclear détente of the Cold War. Again, we will fear destructive technology falling into the wrong hands. This can happen easily. AI machines will not need to be built at an industrial scale, as nuclear capabilities were, and AI-based terrorism will be a force to reckon with.
So here we are, afraid of our own technology all over again.
What is missing from this picture? It continues to illustrate the same destructive pattern of greed and power that has defined so much of our civilization. The failure it shows is moral, and only we can change it. We define civilization by the accumulation of wealth, and this worldview is killing us. The project of civilization we invented has become self-cannibalizing. As long as we do not see this, and we keep on following the same route we have trodden for the past 10,000 years, it will be very hard to legislate the technology to come and to ensure such legislation is followed. Unless, of course, AI helps us become better humans, perhaps by teaching us how stupid we have been for so long. This sounds far-fetched, given who this AI will be serving. But one can always hope.
This article originally appeared on Big Think, home of the brightest minds and biggest ideas of all time.
