| With few parents wanting to purchase second-hand teddy bears, and no quick or easy way to sanitize or recycle the toys, most teddies and other plush animals inevitably end up relegated to basements, attics, and landfills.
This somber treatise on product lifecycles motivated three Rensselaer students to create Sustain-a-Bear. The plush bear, developed as a class project, tackles the challenge of infusing a new, green consciousness into every stage of the teddy bear production timeline, from sourcing raw materials to manufacturing, use, and disposal. The team’s hard work garnered first place in the recent 2009 Manufacturing Student Design Competition held by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
Made out of fleece sourced from recycled PET plastic, Sustain-a-Bear is inexpensive to produce, easy to assemble, fully recyclable, and undeniably cuddly. In place of thread and glue, the assembly process uses ultrasonic welding, which employs heat and vibration to bond together the seven pieces of fabric that comprise a Sustain-a-Bear. This lack of adhesives and stitching, paired with the fact that the bear is stuffed with scraps of the same fleece from which its exterior is made, means a Sustain-a-Bear at the end of its days can be tossed in the recycling bin and easily find a second life as brand-new bear. Full Article
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