In an effort to reduce waste in the manufacturing process, Subaru teamed up with a Japanese supplier to make reusable shopping bags airbags tissue. The bags are made from excess material that is typically discarded during the airbag factory.
The supplier in question is Toyoda Gosei, which is actually part of the Toyota Group. The company has been around since 1949 and produces gaskets, fuel tank components, LEDs, dashboards and consoles as well as airbags. It supplies a variety of automakers, and given Toyota’s close ties to Subaru, the partnership makes sense. Toyota owns 20% of Subaru and collaborates on cars like the 86 AND BRZor the bZ4X AND Solterra.
The airbags are woven with a special nylon which must be flame retardant and gastight. They’re also designed to last a long time, as they need to remain functional through many heating cycles inside a car for years, perhaps decades. If you’ve ever left a typical polypropylene shopping bag in your hot car for too long and watched it disintegrate in your hands, scattering plastic dust everywhere, you know that those so-called eco bags aren’t all that eco-friendly.
Thanks to their soft material, the airbag bags can fold up into a very compact square and are equipped with an elastic band to hold the folded square together. It’s handy for storage, as anyone with a trunk full of canvas shopping bags can attest.
The bags are white but have stripes in both Subaru’s brand name blue or the pinkish-red of the STI performance brand. They’re also designed to have an opening large enough to fit a standard Japanese cypress tub and an onsen towel, two necessary items when visiting one of the country’s many hot springs.
Earlier this year, Toyoda Gosei announced a collaboration with Asics to make sneakers with airbag fabric.
The Subaru bag costs ¥2,500 ($18.62 USD), but so far is only available in Japan.
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