Material Rescue & Reclamation

After a distinguished career fighting fires all fire-hoses eventually get retired. We couldn’t bear to see this heroic material simply going to landfill. Since 2005 Elvis & Kresse have been perfecting the technique of turning these decommissioned hoses into an exciting alternative textile – beautiful, characterful, robust and mostly red! (Although some other colours are available.)

Parachute silk can contain minute flaws that are not visible to the naked eye. For obvious reasons these pieces are not turned into parachutes but with some careful cutting the material is ideal for lining Elvis & Kresse’s bags and wallets.

The off-set printing industry, the one that prints 1000’s of leaflets at a time, uses a printing blanket to transfer ink from the roller onto the paper. If the blanket is damaged or wears out it can no longer be used as any defect would appear on every single leaflet. We reclaim these blankets, clean them up, re-engineer them and create a new (vintage) raw material.

We are working with the Burberry Foundation to solve the problem of the 35,000 tonnes of leather waste produced each year by the European luxury industry. No matter how carefully patterns for leather goods are planned, high quality, unused, freshly tanned and dyed leather falls to the cutting room floor as seemingly unusable pieces. Our system transforms leather fragments from the production of Burberry leather goods into components which are then hand woven, piece by piece, into whole new hides.

Most unroasted, green coffee is imported in 60kg jute or hessian sacks. Once the coffee beans arrive at their roastery, the often highly decorated, biodegradable sacks are disposed of. We currently re-use this material for various purposes, even down to individual strands for the string on our swing tags.

Tea is imported into the country in large craft paper sacks, the inner-most piece is covered in a polymer coated foil to keep the tea fresh. Unfortunately this means that the sacks are not recyclable. We separate these layers by hand and use them to make our packaging, mailing pouches and to print all of our brochures.

Sometimes companies over order or simply order the wrong thing. We rescue these unloved and unwanted materials and use them to line our bags.

Some of the leading auction houses in London hang huge banners to advertise upcoming sales events. Once the auction has finished the banners are no longer useful to them. We take this stunning and unique material and use it as the lining for some of our larger bags.