Craft Night: PLARN! • Thursday, April 25, 5 – 7 pm

Thursday, April 25, 5 – 7 pm
with Chloe Russell Chang

Turn trash into treasure by spinning old plastic bags into plastic yarn, aka PLARN! Join us for a special Craft Night to learn how to make PLARN from old plastic bags and then coil the PLARN into coasters or small baskets. While we may never be able to “get rid” of plastic bags in an ecologically friendly way,* we can create something useful and beautiful to keep these pesky pollutants out of our ecosystem. Textile Center will provide all materials necessary to make a PLARN coiled basket; if you have extra plastic bags from your stash you would like to use, please feel free to bring them. All supplies included!

*Did you know that Americans use about 100 billion plastic bags every year?! Plastic bags, like the kind we get from grocery stores are typically made from petroleum (yuck!), rarely get recycled, and take decades to decompose. In the meantime, these plastics pollute our neighborhoods and clog waterways, causing irreparable damage to wildlife and the health of our planet. Plastic bags and film plastic (like those used in plastic wrap) are NOT accepted in Hennepin County curbside recycling bins and only 10% of commercially-recycled plastic bags are actually recycled into new material! The few plastic bags that do get recycled can only be recycled a couple of times. Most plastic bags that are “recycled” actually end up in landfills or break down into microplastics that never go away :(

For more info on microplastics, check out this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beUhzQAkanM

For more info on the difficulty of recycling plastics check out this article: https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/is-it-possible-to-recycle-plastics-an-infinite-number-of-times