 This is Stink Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. From Hilo, Hawaii, I'm Bernard Bossis and I'm a Senior Business Advisor with the Small Business Development Center in Hilo and we service the East Hawaii area of the Big Island of Hawaii. I'm here today to introduce to you a young lady by the name of Maddie Mae Larson and she is the owner and designer for Upcycle Hawaii. And Maddie has a real interesting history. She started recycling or shall we say, repurposing, reinventing, repurposing and reinventing all the things that we do in Hawaii or all the trash that we do. She started in elementary school. She started making bracelets out of soda can pop tops. Making quilts from torn clothing and things like that. Just repurposing anything she could find. Today and starting in 2016, she started her own business. It was fantastic and she's grown today and she's opened her own LLC now. And without further to do, Maddie, how are you today? I'm very good Bernard. Thank you so much for having me on Think Tank Hawaii today. Well Maddie, I'd like to get right into a little discussion about your business. If that's okay. And can you tell us a little bit of your history with Upcycling? Well Upcycling, yes. Well, my journey kind of starts as a lifelong environmentalist and a lifelong creative. I've been making things since I was a child, as you mentioned. And I started to feel kind of bad about some other resources and materials that I was using in my work. I was using things that were finite sources and I was creating waste. And so I was really motivated to look at materials which we were throwing away and see if I could repurpose those into products that could be brought to market. That's fantastic. So as you're doing those kind of things now you've grown over the years and what got you really into business? Well, what got me into business was the constant comments from my friends, family and strangers on the different items that I was making. I was carrying my pop tab purse around and continued to get comments and people wanted them and so I put together a small inventory and took the first leap and entered my first farmers market back in late 2015. And slowly progressed and before I knew it, I had been in the farmers markets for over a year and I had created an additional 12 products that were actually selling for profit. So what happens after the farmers markets? I mean, you're not so much in the farmers markets anymore. No, I'm not. I was very fortunate to be approached back in early 2016 by a great retail shop up in Javi, known as Elements. And they wanted some of my products. They had seen me in a market and were interested in selling in a local boutique. And so I went home and realized that I was going to have to figure out some wholesale pricing and it wasn't easy but I was able to actually figure out the wholesale pricing on the items that I was creating. And because I was still in a profit margin, I jumped into that first retail opportunity and slowly over the past year and a half, I've been able to gain an additional six wholesale accounts on Hawaii Island. And I've been very fortunate to actually have shipped my products both nationally and internationally. So you're all over the world then? I am officially a worldwide brand. Yes, that is correct. That's fantastic. So now that you've done wholesale, are you out of the farmers markets or? You know, I've been kept very busy with my wholesale orders. And so right now the time just isn't there for me to be able to beat the streets in the markets. And I like to say that I'm fortunate that I don't have to set up my booth, you know, three times a week like I used to, but I also do miss the personal interaction that I used to get with my customers. But you still have customers via internet and co-branding. I mean, can you tell us a little bit about that before we get into your product? Absolutely. So in addition to my wholesale clients, I do have a website, you know, www.upcyclehi.com. And so I do sell my products online via Instagram and my website. And due to a recent customizable option that I have on one of my products, I've been doing a lot of co-branding, which I think we may talk about a little bit later on. Yes, we will. Yeah. You know, with now that we know something about Maddie May and her business, there's really a few things that you do with your business. You go collect stuff because you're recycling, you're helping the environment. Absolutely. And then you make materials that you use to make products. Yes, yes. So tell me a little bit about the stuff that you save the environment. Well, I use a lot of stuff, but first I want to talk about where I get my stuff. Do that. So I collect my stuff from highway cleanups off the side of the roads. I collect my stuff during beach cleanups. And I actually get a lot of my stuff direct from local businesses. There's a lot of what I like to call behind the scenes waste that we don't think about as consumers. Most things get shipped to Hawaii and everything is wrapped in things like plastics. And so I take advantage of those kind of those backdoor channels as far as resources are concerned. And so so I'm very thankful to have to have a community that helps collect for me. But a lot of the stuff that you'll see today is still fine during during some cleanup. Well, why don't you show me a few? All right. Well, you know, as I mentioned, I do work with a lot of materials. So what I brought with you today is actually some of my most popular materials. And in my experience, some of the things that we're throwing away a lot of as consumers. So here I've got something that we should all be very familiar with. I've got some sheet plastics here. And so you may recognize this as some shopping bags from your local grocery store. I believe this might have been a large sheet plastic that was wrapped around a mattress. I was just going to say, it looks like old mattress covers that when I bought a new mattress exactly right. And so we've got our post consumer, what I call sheet plastics here. And then, believe it or not, I also because I do a lot of work with Hawaii Wildlife Fund. Oh, yes. I put a lot of this nasty ghost ropes in these fibers. Oh, ropes like this? You mean like? Yeah. And, you know, Bernard, they actually strangle our wildlife just like that, too. And so what you're doing is you're saving the wildlife. I'd like to think so. Yes, absolutely. I think you are. So we've got our what I call our marine debris. And then another really popular item that we see thrown away a lot are actually old rubber inner tubes. And my hands are going to get dirty from this or? They shouldn't get dirty from my inner tubes. They shouldn't get dirty from your inner tubes. No. And you'll tell me about that in a minute. I will tell you about that in a minute. So tell me so you're getting your inner tubes from the from local bicycle shops. Yeah. And I actually I work with even, believe it or not, inner tubes come in all different shapes and sizes. So even from these tiny little bicycle inner tubes all the way up to inner tubes that would literally encircle me because they're from the tractor trailers. Exactly. So so these are three of my most popular materials that I work with and three things that that I I like to think I keep out of the landfill on a regular basis. You know, I see that we have a plastic bag ban in Hawaii. So you have these these items that come from mattresses of plastic bags. You still able to get plastic bags? You know, ironically, what I get when my friends go on vacation to the mainland and internationally, they don't bring me back stuff. They do bring me back plastic bags. But but you're right. I did see once we enacted the plastic bag ban, which is a wonderful thing. I started to see less and less colored plastics coming into my collection. And so as a result, I've actually started testing or playing with painting the plastics, which has had amazing results. And so now I'm able to further customize these in an artistic process. So you're adapting with changes in society. Absolutely, correct. Yes. Yes. So now that we have these raw materials and things like that, tell me a little bit about how you make make. What do you do with these things? I mean, well, so the plastics are really amazing. And obviously, as we all know, lend themselves great towards melting. So I actually in my studio back at home, I have a commercial heat press and a commercial heat press. Now, is it what's it like this big thing that you pull down? Or it's a it's a decent sized piece of equipment. And it takes a little bit of muscle to lock it in some place. But you can handle that. But I can handle that. Yes, yes. It gives me 100 percent temperature control. And so it's allowed me to to really scale up the production of melting my plastic. So you have to be real specific when handling these things. What happens if it's too warm or too cold or whatever? Well, if it's too cold, it's not going to melt. But we have to be really careful when you're melting plastics, that if you actually create too much heat and burn plastic, you can create a really toxic byproduct. And so I'm very, very careful to make sure that I'm doing this at a low controlled heat. You wear a mask or something. I do wear a mask. Interesting. Yeah, you know, they say I shouldn't even need to wear a mask because of the temperatures I'm using, but better safe than sorry. That's good. That's good. Yes. Plus, it feels cool to wear a mask. So what I'll do is I'll actually take these these thin sheet plastics themselves and I'll create a sandwich and I kind of just go ahead sandwich these down. Let me move this for a second. Give me a little more room and we'll take a little bit of our. Our. No, what are those? So these are these are colored plastics. And even right down to the scraps, I keep every little piece of plastic because this is going to lend itself to a great abstract design. And this is you're getting from these plastic bags over there. This is these are scraps from these plastic bags. That's correct. And what we'll do is I'll just build up a couple of layers of these. We'll take this and I'll put it into my mechanized heat press back in home. And once we release the heat press, we're we're going to end up with a material that's going to look similar to something like this. You can see here. So when you put this in, you're really not just dumping it in there. You're layering it to kind of make a design then. So that becomes part of your artistry and your designing of the material. Absolutely. Correct. So I think it's the same. Nothing's the same. So I like to call it usable art and no two designs can ever be replicated. And so this is a result of when we melt plastic on plastic. But as we talked about earlier, we've been running out of those colored plastic bags. So I've actually been putting some work into painting these plastics. So absolutely. What are you doing? What you'll see here is the blue background has been hand painted. And then our dolphins have been added via silk screen stencil. Now, when you paint plastic, it rubs off, right? It does. So what I've done is I've gone ahead and laminated and another couple of layers of plastic over the paint to form a protective layer for that. So now you have a stencil. Yes. That you put on this. It's like screen painting. Like when you screen paint shirts and exactly right. So I'm screen printing, but I'm doing so on plastic. Now, so you designed your own screen print. I do. I do design my own silk screens. And I have my own customizable silk screen process. So if we can think it or print it, we can make it. Very interesting. So yeah. Well, that's a result of the painting of our plastics. OK, I'll put this down. So that's how you're you're taking care of your plastics. And so all your plastics are going to be soft like that. So that's going to be a result of this technique here and this type of plastic. Now, when we start to get into the rope fibers and the marine debris, we're going to get a slightly different result. Be. Yes. You know, before we get into this, why don't we take a short break and then we'll get into the rest of our materials? And why don't we do that first? Sounds great. OK, thank you very much. We'll be right back in a minute or two. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. When I was growing up, I was among the one in six American kids who struggled with hunger and hungry mornings make tired days, grumpy days, kind of days. But with the power of breakfast, the kids in your neighborhood can think big and be more. We're not hungry for breakfast. We're hungry for more, more ideas, more dreams, more fun. When kids aren't hungry for breakfast, they can be hungry for more. Go to hungeris.org and lend your time or your voice to make breakfast happen for kids in your neighborhood. Hi, I'm Dave Stevens, the host of Cyber Underground every Friday here at 1 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii.com. And then every episode is uploaded to the Cyber Underground that library of shows that you can see of mine on YouTube.com. And I hope you'll join us here every Friday. We have some topical discussions about why security matters and what could scare the absolute bejesus out of you. If you just try to watch my show all the way through. Hope to see you next time on the Cyber Underground. Stay safe. Hey, Aloha, Stan Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii, where community matters. This is the place to come to think about all things energy. We talk about energy for the grid, energy for vehicles, energy and transportation, energy and maritime, energy and aviation. We have all kinds of things on our show. But we always focus on hydrogen here in Hawaii, because it's my favorite thing. That's what I like to do. But we talk about things that make a difference here in Hawaii, things that should be a big changer for Hawaii. And we hope that you'll join us every Friday at noon on Stan Energyman and take a look with us at new technologies and new thoughts on how we can get clean and green in Hawaii. Welcome back. And Maddie May, we've been talking about how we take these materials and you kind of have a soft plastic material that you're working with. And I was asking you, you know, all your materials are not all soft like that. So how do you how do you make them hard or or whatever be it? Well, the the hard is kind of a byproduct of what it is that I'm melting. A lot of these marine debris, ghost nets and ropes that I hung my software, the one that you hung yourself with. So these are actually polyesters in nylons. And what's going to happen is that these are going to melt to a bit of a thicker and more rigid material. So that's going to lend itself to a slightly different product. And I actually brought today to show you kind of the type of materials that this results in. And so if you see here, what I've done is I've taken the inside the core of this rope here. You see that beautiful rainbow core on the inside? Well, I've separated out those fibers. And just like the plastic over here, I've created a sandwich technique where I put these fibers between layers of plastic. Can you show us how that's done? Yeah, we can show you how it's done. I mean, I'm not going to give away all my secrets. Oh, OK, OK, not all your secrets. But I mean, just just like before, we're going to we're going to spread out in a in a much more refined way and create layers of our plastic. And then it would come out like this. So this this is going to come out like this in one thin layer. And what I brought here today was two different pieces to kind of show you if you feel that one, it's a little bit thinner. This is thicker. And it's it's got some more of the detail in it. And that's because I build these up layers at a time. And so this is to show you a little bit of building it up. It gets thicker and thicker and harder and harder. And if you see, you still see that there's a few holes in this plastic here. Yes, you can see little holes in here. So this material is indeed still they work like teeth marks. Well, this this material is still indeed a work in progress. So we'll take a few more layers to build up before that piece of base material is complete and ready for the next part. And then it becomes nice and rigid, nice and rigid. Yes. Yeah. OK, so that's how you process these. And so we've looked at how you're processing plastic bags into a softer material. And then we're taking the ropes and nets and things like that, because it's all made from this particular material and how you're making a harder, shall we say, material. Exactly. That that you you're going to use for some different products, right? Totally. But you also brought these. Well, these aren't so dirty, but dirty inner tubes. I was afraid I was going to get all black, you know, how you touch a tire and it gets. That's my hands get all black when I first received my rubber. OK, but they're not black today. They're not black today. So they come to me in piles of oil and covered in grease and the notorious white talcum powder that coats the inside of an inner tube. And when I first get them, the first part of the process is to clean them. And so each inner tube, each piece of rubber itself has to be hand cleaned. And once the process inside and out for the thin ones that are meant to be tubes, they're not going to get scrubbed on the inside, but they will get rinsed through the inside. Absolutely. And once the cleaning process is completed, we are then going to hand condition each one of our inner tubes. And I brought you a nice big piece there. That was actually a mountain bike tire. OK. And I really like the mountain bike tires, because as you can see, it gives us a really nice big piece of material once we have that all cut open. So it's a piece of rubber. Well, we actually have a new name for this material. Oh, yes, please, please. We are calling it vegan leather. Now, I can understand that. It really lends itself to a similar feel and nice and soft. And look, my hands are nice and clean. And when I when I work it, I work it just like I would work a leather product. And so the bicycle rubber inner tubes really been kind of an overwhelming material because I didn't realize how much rubber inner tubes were being thrown away on a regular basis until I started to go and to work with the local bike shops. They're all over the place. They're all over the place. And Bernard, it's Ironman season in October. Yes. So as you can imagine, there are a lot of inner tubes just past October that are looking for. That's right. This is December. So you must have had a big cleanup already. There's a lot of rubber inner tubes sitting under the house right now. OK. Yes. So this is our vegan leather. So this is this is the material that you're going to use to be making thing. Right. So so with all with all of our even with the little patches with the little patches, you know, all these inner tubes still have many miles to give. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. So now we have materials. We have vegan leather. We have more rigid plastic. And then we have some soft plastic. Now what happens? All right. So now the fun begins or at least a lot of sewing begins and in our first case here with our thin plastic. OK. So my upcycle wise most popular item by far, our biggest seller are our water resistant, fused plastic zipper pouches. OK. And so I brought you these today and that is exactly the perfect thing that these materials lend themselves to. Caution. Now this is one of my original caution tape bags. And so you can see that I did take this caution tape from an event that I had did, I believe in Kailua Kona last year. And simply use that to create a melted design on the bag. I was inspired by the opening of Fissure 8. And as I mentioned, we were doing some hand painting. So this is one of our hand painted fused plastic pouches here. Go ahead. Yeah. And so now when you say hand painted, so all this is hand painted and then you put a piece of plastic over it to protect all the painting. So this will never wear off. It will never wear off. No, absolutely not. So this thing could last a lifetime. Well, according to the charts that I know, plastic is supposed to be around for 80 to 1,000 years. That's a lifetime. So some of my work may indeed outlive me. Yes, that's correct. That's correct. We've also got one of my favorites here. You can see, if you look very closely, I've taken all of those warning signs off of plastic bags and created kind of a melted plastic applique design there. This is great. Yeah, and we talked a little bit about co-branding earlier. And so here I have just a small sample of a mahi mahi. And this is a design that belongs to Sundot Marine Fish Flags. Yes, located in Hilo. Located over on the Big Island. And they approached me a few months ago to take their logos and recreate them onto my melted fuse plastic bags. So now what do they do with these? So now this is actually just a small portion of what will become a zipper pouch. And they sell them on their website. And they sell them at their markets. And so it's a beautiful co-branding opportunity. OK, so now you've co-branded with this company. Sundot Marine Fish Farms. So with Sundot Marine, no, are there other major co-brandings that you've done so far? There are. I just completed a 600 bag order with the four seasons. I'm looking for my sample, but I don't see that in my handy dandy bag today. That's fine. It was one of my hand-painted fuse plastics here. And we were able to take their silk screen logo and just replicate it right onto the back. So as we mentioned before, if it prints or we can think it, we can make it. And so all of our designs are fully customizable. I brought one more to show you just so that we could see the difference in colors. Can you see the pineapple in here? Beautiful. You can see why we've gone black with our logos on there. But now you have some harder things that you make. We're running out of it. So you can see here I'm wearing my earrings. So these are actually melted, fused plastic, put onto earrings. And why stop at earrings when we can take those and we can make, we have night lights here. So I'm going to hand those to you. I'm going to put these just right here. So people can start to see them. And we've got our bookmarks. I'm going to give you my dolphin here. Oh, this is, can I take this home? You can. Watch out, his blow-spout was getting a little bit funny there. And then one of our very new products here is our Melted Marine Debris key rings. Oh, beautiful. So beautiful. Oh, my wife would like this. Thank you. Thank you, Honu. And then of course, because we're from the big island, we've got our big island, lots of products here. Let's go ahead and put a few earrings out just because they are my favorites. You had a black one down there too. So our vegan leather earrings? Yes. All right, so, well, you know, because nothing would be complete. Oh, there's that. Here's our Four Seasons bag. Nothing could be complete without making some zipper pouches. So you can see we have our vegan leather zipper pouches here. Very nice, very nice. And you can't make anything out of leather without making wallets. And so we've, of course, got our wallets. Oh, these are perfect. And your money doesn't fall out either. No, you can put it in your back pocket and it will grip. It'll grip unless somebody tries to rip it out. Well, they'd have to fight me for it. Okay. I don't wanna fight you for it. And then the creation of all of these rubber inner tube products are gonna require cutting and around the edges, which is gonna leave me with a bowl full of scraps. So I'm actually able to take those scraps and take it one step farther. Yeah. And we've created an entire line of different earrings that are all made from our vegan leather here. I'm gonna put this right over here so everybody can see it. Yes. Oh, this is pretty, too. We add a little Swarovski crystal on that one here. Oh, look at this. Yes. This is fantastic. Put this right over here. I'm gonna stand it up like that. And while you're reaching for that, I'm gonna put a couple of our melted plastic earrings on the table just to complete our display here. So this goes to show that really the possibilities are endless when it comes to reclaiming and repurposing. And if you have the creative mind to think these things through, then the way that I look at it is we're throwing away a lot of materials that deserve a second life and with a little bit of love and effort can reshine again. I have one more question. Yes. The world. Yes. The world can order these products from you. You can co-brand around the world. I believe you once told me that you are in the process of co-branding in Japan. Yes, absolutely. We're in the middle of doing some custom work with a retailer out of Japan at the moment right here. So how do people contact you? Well, you know, in the world of Google, it's very easy. All you have to do is Google Upcycle Hawaii. And I very well should be the first thing that jumps to the top of the list. There you go. But you can dial right into our website at www.upcyclehi.com. And that's shown right on our screen right now. Upcyclehi.com. And then I'm very active on Instagram. I like to share the behind the scenes stories. And so the best way to get that information is to follow me at Upscycle Hawaii on Instagram. Now Upscycle Hawaii, oh, there it is, right there on our screen now. Perfect. And that spelled out. That one spelled out Upscycle Hawaii. The website is upcyclehi.com. That's terrific. Well, I want to thank Maddie May for coming to visit with us today. This has been a fantastic time. We've learned about recycling, saving marine life, how you can make materials, and then how you can make final products which are usable and actually can last a lifetime. Well, I want to thank you, Bernard, for bringing me to Think Tech Hawaii today. And more importantly, thank the Small Business Development Center for helping Upscycle Hawaii grow and reach the potential that we really can reach. We couldn't do it without you. Well, everybody out there in the world, you'll be able to contact Upscycle Hawaii there. We can show their website and Instagram on the screen again. And we want to thank you again for joining us today. Maddie May, thanks for being here. Absolutely, Bernard. Have a beautiful weekend. You too. Aloha. Aloha.