![]() ![]() ![]() Paul, Minn., company that turns old vinyl billboards into new products, including tarps, pond liners and bags. A day in the life of Billboard Tarps, a St. “Customers pay us money so they should get something, we figured,” he says. What the billboard companies liked, says McConville, is that Billboard Tarps was willing to pay for the materials. “We knew there were a lot of applications we could use for these billboards, from tarps to pond liners to companies that make bags out of them. “In the past, the billboard companies were just throwing them away-they were going into landfills,” says McConville. That took a variety of forms, but none as significant as its work developing new uses for old vinyl billboards. Paul, Minn., started out in 1998 as a liquidation business but quickly found that its real niche was “plucking things destined for the waste stream and finding alternative uses for them,” says company co-founder Matt McConville. That’s the biggest reason why they knock on our door.” Billboards become tarpsīillboard Tarps, based in St. “The younger people have discovered the brand because they are more focused on sustainability. When Freitag first started, says Isenegger, many of its customers favored the company’s bags because they were unique, durable and functional. But we really want to offer a wide variety it’s what attracts our following.” ![]() “One of the natural bottlenecks in our business model is our concept that every bag is individual-but logistically it is not always easy to get enough diversity in the truck tarp pieces. “It can be hard to find tarps,” she adds. A set of transparent molds is then used to cut out the bags, each one unique. “It’s not only about getting a lot of them, but also a mix of colors and designs so that we can upcycle them into unique beautiful bags and accessories.”Īfter receiving the tarps (which the company pays for) Freitag removes anything unusable, cuts them into manageable sizes and washes them in recycled rainwater. “We try to collect as many and diverse tarps as possible,” says Isenegger. “We have soft and colorful truck tarps, not the metal-based hard covers.”įrom the time Markus Freitag first dragged an old tarp into his apartment in 1993 and made a bag from it, Freitag has opened 29 retail stores, partnered with 300 resellers, and established a robust, worldwide online market, boosted as of late by customers attracted to the company’s eco-friendly philosophy.įreitag has a team of five people who work with European logistics companies to find and collect the used tarps, from the Netherlands to Portugal. “In the U.S., you don’t have these truck tarps on the road,” explains Elisabeth Isenegger, the company’s head of communications. In the case of Freitag, which makes bags and accessories from recycled truck tarpaulins in Zurich, Switzerland, that may be simply because truck tarps are much more common on its side of the Atlantic. It’s no secret that Europe and Asia are sometimes ahead of the U.S. Photo: Freitag Transforming tarps to handbags ![]()
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