Plastic bags, backpacks and solar power

Here's a story highlighting some real business creativity: a group of South African entrepreneurs taking plastic bags and refashioning them into solar powered backpacks designed to give children light to study with.

Rethaka (Pty) Ltd., in Rustenburg, South Africa, collects the plastic bags and take them to its small factory, where they're cleaned and turned into a textile-like material.

Then it sews the material into backpacks, and adds a small, removable solar charger, which collects power as the kids walk home.

The chargers can be easily removed and screwed onto lamps made from mason jars. They then provide six to nine hours of light, crucial for studying if the kids are among the 1.3 billion people worldwide without regular access to electricity.

It's the brainchild of 22-year-old CEO Thato Kgatlhanye, who started it with some of her classmates in university in Johannesburg. According to this Forbes article, Kgatlhanye got the idea after noticing a lot of kids carrying their schoolbooks in plastic bags.

Someone else suggested adding a charger, and after a lot of tinkering and $50,000 in seed money, the Repurpose Schoolbag was born.

The for-profit company's website says the backpacks are “made 100 percent from plastic shopping bags” and have a couple of benefits to society: they reduce plastic pollution, and they reduce the use of kerosene lanterns, which can be dangerous, inefficient and polluting.

A video (just below) from the AFKInsider Africa business news site taking a look at Rethaka's operation and manufacturing process.

They backpacks are stylish, in my opinion. Kgatlhanye worked with an industrial designer to also make them durable, and says the company is branching into tote bags, messenger bags and other products.

Rethaka began as a social enterprise. Today it has 17 employees. It's not one of the more traditional plastic companies we write about but it's an example of creatively tackling society's waste, in this case plastic, and turning it into something useful.