Alumna Ruth Weerasinghe designs exclusive backpack for UBS with The R Collective

Our Redress Design Award alumni are supported in their careers even beyond the competition. 2020 Runner-up, Ruth Weerasinghe, recently had the opportunity to work with The R Collective, the social impact business that rescues, reuses, and recycles a wide range of excess materials, to design a backpack exclusively for UBS.

Ruth’s industrial waste upcycling brand, SO4, worked with The R Collective to create the design from rescued waste materials, including car airbags, tuk tuk covers, strap and tyre waste, alongside rescued deadstock, write off textile waste. The collaboration follows her Redress Design Award collection, SO4 Outlast, which was designed with longevity in mind by using protective, durable materials.

“This collaboration is a point of connection to the outside world,” Ruth shares. “People actually start looking at waste from a different angle and they will also be inspired to reuse waste. It’ll become like a culture all over the world.”

Handcrafted by Sri Lankan artisans, this one-of-a-kind bag may carry irregularities and authentic markings that represent the waste materials’ previous life. Such markings subtly symbolise the success of giving waste a second life.

This bag is possibly the most challenging rescue and redesign collaboration that we’ve ever dared to do,” shares Christina Dean, Founder of Redress and The R Collective. “We’ve rescued a really tricky set of waste streams, and it is really the power of collaboration that has resulted in this product, which is now proudly walking on the backs of people all over the world.”