OPEN TO A NEW IDEA
Umbrellas made from found plastic? One local entrepreneur is giving it a try.
It was a not-so-pleasant experience with an old umbrella that inspired Deirdre Horan to create a new kind of umbrella.
On her way to work in Boston in 2018, Horan’s umbrella flipped inside out and snapped. When she checked the tag, it said it was made from 100 percent polyester.
It got Horan thinking about when she learned how plastic waste impacts the ocean, which inspired her to launch Dri, an eco-friendly company based in Berkshire County, where she grew up, with a mission to divert plastic from entering waste streams and, often, the sea.
“I knew the type of plastic that’s going into the ocean is actually recyclable in a lot of cases and can be made into polyester fabric,” Horan said. “I started putting the pieces together, and thought, ‘Why can’t we make these with recycled fabric instead of new fabric?’”
Each Dri umbrella canopy consists of eight plastic bottles, Horan said. It also has a bamboo handle, a stainless steel shaft, and a Dri logo. They’re also sturdily built. Every year, more than one billion umbrellas end up in landfills, Horan said, many due to breakage.
“It was really important to me that [the umbrellas] were structurally sound and durable as well.”
The umbrellas are manufactured at Tai Yu Xing Umbrellas in China, where the fabric is hand-cut and hand-sewn onto an umbrella frame.
The plastic used to develop the umbrellas is hand-collected from beaches in Thailand between Bangkok and Ryaong, then made into polyester.
“A lot of the trash that [the United States and other countries] accumulate are exported to small countries in Southeast Asia,” Horan said. The plastic that’s put in poorly managed landfills eventually ends up in the ocean, she added, and those countries often don’t have the waste management infrastructure to deal with large volumes of trash.
On April 22 (Earth Day), Horan launched a sales campaign on Kickstarter for the first production run of Dri umbrellas. Within the first fehours of launching the campaign, Horan reached her goal of $12,000, which would help cover the cost of materials for the umbrellas.
She was able to increase her goal to assist in manufacturing and shipping costs. When the campaign ended on May 21, she’d raised nearly $30,000 and sold some 570 umbrellas, which will deliver by October. Now she’s taking pre-orders on Dri’s website with umbrellas being sold at $65 apiece.
“I wanted to launch Dri as a way to just show people that it’s easy to incorporate sustainability into their lives,” Horan said. “If it’s just by making purchases that support ecofriendly brands, they can have an impact in many ways.”
‘I wanted to launch Dri as a way to just show people that it’s easy to incorporate sustainability into their lives.’
DEIRDRE HORAN, founder of eco-friendly company Dri