GOT BAG GmbH

GOT BAG ROLLTOP LITE

The Rolltop lite is the newest member of the GOT BAG backpack collection. All backpacks are made of recycled Ocean Impact Plastic, collected at the own Clean-up-Program located in Java, Indonesia.

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General Description

Benjamin Mandos and Roman Ruster, the two founders of GOT BAG, had been closely connected to the sea since childhood and actively wanted to do something about the increasing amounts of plastic they saw entering the oceans, so they decided to invent the first ever backpack made of Ocean Impact Plastic. Symbolically, a backpack fits well with this theme as it stands for the fact that we all have to shoulder the great task of ensuring the water quality for the future of flora and fauna.

Indonesia generates more than three million tons of plastic waste annually, making it the second-most polluting country. Around a third of it ends up in the ocean every year. In Indonesia, GOT BAG quickly found partners who can process the collected plastics into pellets in a technologically demanding process. They were also able to identify customers who produce additional new articles from all types of plastics that are not usable for the production of GOT BAG products or use them for heat generation.

Sustainability Impact

GOT BAG’s work aims to take holistic action against plastic waste in the environment. To produce the world’s first backpack made of self-collected ocean plastic, the team around founder Benjamin Mandos set up its own clean-up program in Indonesia in 2016.

As a result of the increasing level of awareness and the growing sales volume of the products, it has since been able to expand its area of impact on site. Based on clean-up experiences gained locally and the calculations of Jambeck et al. (2015), the team is now no longer exclusively collecting plastic from the ocean, but is able to open up ever larger areas with the collection points, starting from the coast. By giving local people a direct opportunity to recycle and by creating basic waste management structures, GOT BAG is providing preventive support to avoid that improperly disposed plastic waste threatens the ocean in the long term and has thus been able to multiply the impact for the local ecosystem in the first two years of operations. The start-up summarizes the plastic collected on site with the term Ocean Impact Plastic.