Help for Haiti in the bags

If you’re a plastic bag, then Ruby Sprengle wants you, even though she loathes you.

And once she finds your crinkly little self, she’s going to flatten you like a pancake with a red-hot iron.

“I hate plastic bags,” says Sprengle, a University of Oregon material product studies major in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts. “Animals get caught in them and they’re just ugly.”

Many consider plastic shopping bags to be an environmental hazard for various reasons, not the least of which is the danger they pose to wildlife. Sea turtles, whales and other marine life have been known to mistake them for food, ingest them and die from choking or intestinal blockage.

But Sprengle, 22, has a better idea. Make tarps out of them for the homeless in earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

“They don’t have enough tents for everybody,” says Sprengle, standing over one of her creations in the Craft Center at the UO’s Erb Memorial Union. “So people are making tents out of branches and sheets and plastic bags. They don’t have anything. Their homes were completely destroyed.”

The 7.0 earthquake that hit the Caribbean island nation on Jan. 12 killed an estimated 200,000 to 250,000. One day in February, Sprengle was walking to class and listening to a program on National Public Radio about how the American Red Cross has given out thousands of tarps to homeless Haitians. But with the rainy season fast approaching (May is Haiti’s rainiest month), more are desperately needed.

“So I thought of this project immediately,” Sprengle says.

This project was the one Sprengle did in an “Urban Survival Workshop” last June in Portland with UO product design husband-and-wife team John and Wonhee Arndt. Students in the one-week workshop were asked to make portable shelters out of discarded materials. Sprengle had already read about the process of ironing plastic bags together in a book called “Making It: Manufacturing Techniques for Product Design.”

“It was a great project,” says John Arndt, a UO assistant professor of product design. “We were really impressed with what Ruby did.”

What Sprengle did in the workshop was make a 6-foot by 6-foot “utility quilt” out of plastic bags. It even has a map of downtown Portland on the back where homeless people can find food, medical supplies, clothes and other necessities.

Sprengle tested the quilt by sleeping outside with other students in an industrial part of southeast Portland.

“I didn’t get much sleep just because of the trains, but I was comfortable,” Sprengle says. The ironing process seems to eliminate the air bubbles from the plastic and make it nice and smooth, yet sturdy.

She called it a utility quilt because when it’s finished, it looks like a patchwork quilt, she says. Indeed, all of the colors and designs on the bags that say Safeway and Albertsons, Rite-Aid and Winco, Walgreens and Wal-Mart, do make the finished product look quiltlike.

But after Sprengle heard the NPR program, she decided to try and make larger pieces, such as the 10-foot by 12-foot one she was working on with volunteers at a workshop on Saturday at the School and Community Reuse Action Project, or SCRAP, in Portland. More than 100 people showed up with bags and irons, ready to go.

“We actually blew out all of the (electric) sockets in one room, so we had to stop ironing,” Sprengle says with a laugh.

Now she needs more volunteers for upcoming workshops this month.

“We got a lot of work done, and I’m ready for the next (workshop) because I want to make lots of these tarps,” Sprengle says. She and volunteers have made four so far, but she has a goal of making 100 this spring. “I know once we get those people helping and we get an assembly line going, we’ll be able to crank them out,” she says.

It takes about 400 plastic bags to make a tarp. Start by taking one plastic bag, fold it a couple of times vertically, then cut off the top and bottom. That leaves a double-sided rectangular piece. Do that with two more bags and you’re ready to place all three flattened bag pieces between two pieces of tracing paper and iron. Once you have lots of pieces, you slightly overlap them and meld them together with more ironing. Sprengle then uses grommets and clear duct tape on the ends to finish the tarps.

But how to get them to Haiti?

She’s hoping a couple of Portland firefighters deploying there on a mission this weekend will take a couple of the four tarps already made. Her father is a barge captain in Florida who often goes to Haiti. He’s told his daughter that if she can get them to Florida, he will take them from there. She’s also looking for other missionaries to take them on future trips.

“It’s just all a matter of networking, really,” says Sprengle, who attended Southridge High School in Beaverton and will graduate from the UO in June with one major in material and product studies and another in French. She plans on getting a second bachelor’s degree in fine arts next school year from the UO’s Portland campus. After that, she’d maybe like to work in product design in Third World countries. She has plenty of ideas for other products using plastic bags.

“I was thinking a raincoat would be cool,” she says.