{"id":40310,"date":"2016-05-06T12:15:58","date_gmt":"2016-05-06T17:15:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/?p=40310"},"modified":"2016-05-06T12:15:58","modified_gmt":"2016-05-06T17:15:58","slug":"plastic-bags-the-stuff-that-dreams-are-made-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/plastic-bags-the-stuff-that-dreams-are-made-of\/","title":{"rendered":"Plastic bags &#8212; the stuff that dreams are made of"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong> By Xiao Lyu &amp; Qingwei Chen <\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"dropcap\">Mary Moy, vice president of New Life for Old Bags (NLOB), has\u00a0crocheted\u00a052 sleeping mats\u00a0in the last\u00a05 years ago. But the mats are not made of yarn, they&#8217;re made from discarded plastic shopping bags. The process\u00a0not only recycles the bags, but gives them new life: as sleeping\u00a0mats for\u00a0the homeless.<\/p>\n<p>Every Tuesday afternoon NLOB volunteers work hard turning old bags into beautiful and useful mats at Bethesda Home and Retirement Center in MontClare. Each six-by-two-foot mat takes between 500 and 700 bags and requires 80 hours to make.<\/p>\n<p>[vimeo 165179602 w=474]<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Group founder Ruth Werstler officially started to run this organization in late 2009. The inspiration of this idea came from a local news report that her father watched on TV about a group of elderly women in Palatine who were making mats.<\/p>\n<p>In 6 years, the fast-growing group of volunteers has contained people of all backgrounds, including Cynthia Hernandez, who has worked on\u00a0this team for 3 years. Hernandez lives at Friedman Place for the blind and comes over to make the mat every Saturday and Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I like the texture of the plastic and I like sharing the sleeping mats with the homeless people,&#8221; Hernandez said.<\/p>\n<p>Besides helping the homeless, NLOB says their project also aims to protect the environment.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We are keeping a lot of these bags out of the garbage, out of the landfills, out of the oceans,&#8221; Moy said. &#8220;Plastic is a resource and don\u2019t think they are endless supply, we are doing to our planet a lot of harm, we should be careful on how we use them.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Xiao Lyu &amp; Qingwei Chen Mary Moy, vice president of New Life for Old Bags (NLOB), has\u00a0crocheted\u00a052 sleeping mats\u00a0in the last\u00a05 years ago. But the mats are not made of yarn, they&#8217;re made from discarded plastic shopping bags. The process\u00a0not only recycles the bags, but gives them new life: as sleeping\u00a0mats for\u00a0the homeless. Every [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":199,"featured_media":41286,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[585],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-winter-2016"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Plastic bags - the stuff that dreams are made of - Medill Reports Chicago<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/plastic-bags-the-stuff-that-dreams-are-made-of\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Plastic bags - the stuff that dreams are made of - Medill Reports Chicago\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By Xiao Lyu &amp; Qingwei Chen Mary Moy, vice president of New Life for Old Bags (NLOB), has\u00a0crocheted\u00a052 sleeping mats\u00a0in the last\u00a05 years ago. But the mats are not made of yarn, they&#8217;re made from discarded plastic shopping bags. The process\u00a0not only recycles the bags, but gives them new life: as sleeping\u00a0mats for\u00a0the homeless. 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