THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, May 16, 1996 TAG: 9605160518
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
So you've made the big choice: plastic over paper. But you get home from the supermarket, unpack all your plastic-wrapped goods from all those plastic grocery bags and start wondering - What do I do with all this darned plastic?
Betty Buss may have an answer: the Earth Chair.
A Chesapeake dressmaker and avid environmentalist, Buss has come up with a creative solution for guilt-ridden eco-shoppers that 1) provides a good excuse to save and reuse those bothersome grocery bags and 2) makes a comfortable piece of furniture afterward.
Buss has just started selling specially designed fabric shells that, once opened with the rip of a Velcro zipper, can be stuffed with hundreds of old plastic bags and packages.
Buss charges $25 per fabric shell. They are corduroy and, of course, come in earth-tone colors (brown, gray and green).
After a few months of stuffing, the pillowy result looks and feels like a bean-bag chair. But without the beans.
``Sit in it,'' Buss excitedly instructed a visitor who plops down in a big, round, green Earth Chair on display in her home studio. ``Isn't it great?'' she asked.
Buss got her idea, not surprisingly, while sitting. She was working on the floor and resting on a big sack of plastic grocery bags she'd collected from months of trips to the local market when the proverbial light bulb went off.
``I said to myself sitting there, `Hey, this is kind of nice,' '' she recalled.
At that moment, Buss looked across her studio and saw a round piece of yellow fabric she was planning to make into pet cushions for a client. She instead stuffed it with her sack of plastic bags, and the first Earth Chair was born.
Buyers of the chairs must do the stuffing with their own plastic bags. ``That's the environmental-ethic part of this,'' she explained. ``It gives you a place to put all that plastic.''
Self-starters can purchase shell design and sewing instructions for $2. For anyone who supplies their own fabric, Buss will stitch one for $10.
Despite appearances, Buss is a reluctant capitalist. She does not plan to patent her idea nor does she care if anyone copies it. Other than trying to generate enough money to pay her mortgage and maybe buy a new furnace, she said her interest is to encourage people to act environmentally.
Indeed, the motto for her puffy new product is environmental: ``A comfortable solution to today's landfill problems.''
Like a pillow, the 10-pound-or-so Earth Chair can be picked up and fluffed back into shape when it starts to flatten out from heavy use.
An expert seamstress, Buss has been trying to find a niche like this for years. She made dolls for a while, and continues to design and make prom dresses and other clothes.
Buss and her husband, John, once invested $1,000 in materials that they crafted into doll-house furniture. ``We didn't sell any of it,'' she chuckled. ``We ended up selling it cheap to our friends. And we gave a lot of it away to hospitals and schools.''
A former folk singer and self-described hippie, Buss, who is 47, has always been interested in environmental issues. ``I save everything,'' she said. ``There's enough trash filling up our world.''
In her back yard, she has turned an old tractor tire into a flower garden. And a recycling bin can be seen overflowing with plastic bottles and cans.
So it was that she started hoarding plastic grocery bags and other packaging - everything from the plastic wrapping around batteries, dress shirts and toilet paper to the plastic sheaths that protect her morning newspaper on rainy days.
Buss has only started marketing her invention. Her debut was at a booth she rented for Earth Day festivities earlier this month at Mount Trashmore in Virginia Beach.
``Everyone who came by said, `Ooo, what a neat idea,' but we didn't sell too many,'' she said.
Buss has made seven Earth Chairs and sold two. Another is on order, and she has cut a deal with her hairdresser for one more. She gets a free haircut, her hairdresser gets a chair.
``Hey, I needed a haircut. What can I say?'' Buss said. MEMO: For more information about The Earth Chair, call Betty Buss at 465-7645,
or write to: Earth Chair, 4708 Charlton Drive, Chesapeake, Va., 23321.
ILLUSTRATION: CANDICE C. CUSIC
The Virginian-Pilot
Chesapeake resident Betty Buss has come up with a creative solution
for getting rid of those plastic grocery bags in an environmentally
friendly way: Earth Chair.
by CNB