Kat Nouri along with her Stasher silicone sandwich bag.
Kat Nouri has a love-hate relationship with plastic.
As an artist and product designer, she’s enamored with its transparency and the countless artistic makes use of for it. However as a mom, and an environmentally-conscious client, she’s disgusted by it.
“Plastic is a big part of our daily lives. There’s no denying it,” stated Nouri. “But every time we use more of it , we’re harming ourselves and Earth.”
So she’s doing one thing about it.
On Thursday, Nouri unveiled Stasher, a line of sandwich luggage made totally of silicone, a pure materials manufactured from sand, rock and oxygen.
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Like plastic sandwich luggage, the silicone luggage function the identical pinch-press, air-tight closure. However the comparisons finish there, stated Nouri.
Her silicone luggage are petroleum-free and include no PVC, latex or phthalates.
And whereas 20 million plastic luggage find yourself in U.S. landfills every day, Stasher luggage are reusable for not less than three years and may be frozen, microwaved or put within the dishwasher.
Clear Stasher luggage value $12.99 every. The luggage that includes circus, area and monster designs value $14.99 every.
With dry-erase markers, you may scribble notes and labels straight onto the bag’s floor. Not feeling artistic? The luggage additionally are available in enjoyable designs — suppose circus, area and monster themes.
Stasher luggage might be accessible on-line in February and in retail shops in March.
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Nouri has been on a private campaign for greater than a decade to assist shoppers substitute on a regular basis plastic merchandise with safer silicone-based alternate options.
She was partly motivated by her upbringing in Iran.
“My father was a champion wrestler and my mother has a PhD in nutrition,” she stated. “So I was very conscious about health and nutrition growing up.”
Nouri immigrated to the San Francisco Bay Space when she was 10.
“I became somewhat of a rebel,” stated Nouri. “I was just very creative and wanted to do things my way.”
After graduating from UC Berkeley, Nouri took a gross sales and advertising and marketing internship at IBM. “But I always had a little business venture on the side,” she stated. “People would constantly tell me I was a natural entrepreneur.”
Nouri launched her firm Fashionable Twist in 2005. The corporate makes silicone-based placemats, coasters and quite a lot of child objects, together with bibs, cups and meals containers.
“As consumers, we focus more on what we eat,” stated Nouri, who has three children. “To me, especially as a mom, it was just as important to evaluate where we are putting our food. I was packing three lunches a day in plastic bags.”
Right now, Fashionable Twist is worthwhile, generates about $10 million a yr in income, and its merchandise are offered in over 4,000 retailers nationwide.
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Nouri stated Stasher luggage are a pure evolution of her imaginative and prescient for a plastics-free world.
She spent three years and $500,000 researching and creating the silicon sandwich luggage. “It was a big investment for us at the time and I nearly went broke,” she stated.
The silicone luggage (which promote for $12.99 to $14.99 apiece) do value fairly a bit greater than a field of disposable plastic luggage. Nonetheless, she’s hopeful that the long-term financial and environmental worth of the silicone luggage will sway shoppers to purchase them.
Within the meantime, Nouri is already planning to develop the Stasher line with different sizes later this yr.
“I hope that these bags can become a symbol of how we are rethinking plastic and caring for our planet,” she stated.
CNNMoney (New York) First printed January 28, 2016: 8:00 AM ET