Staff members at North Little Rock's William F. Laman Public Library System are asking people to donate plastic bags and help it turn them into mats for people who are homeless.
The program is more of a reuse, rather than recycling, program, putting to use the plastic bags that aren't as easy to recycle as other materials. It's also a part of the library's new programming that debuted this month.
Staff members were looking for new programming ideas, and adult programming director Carol Kirkpatrick found mats made out of plastic bags while searching the Internet. Other libraries had been doing it, too.
Kirkpatrick wanted to do a community service project, like previous programs that provided Christmas cards for military veterans and accepted food donations for the hungry in lieu of fines. The mats provide a cushion for people who may not have a soft surface to sleep on. Plus, they are lightweight and don't get bugs in them, she said.
"I just thought that they were just such a good idea," Kirkpatrick said.
So about a month ago, the library began asking for people's plastic bags. Staff set up a crochet table on the first floor of the main library last week.
"It gets the community together," said Richard Theilig, associate director of the special projects for the library. He noted the turnout for the first crochet event March 18 in which 54 volunteers crocheted mats.
Waste Management doesn't accept plastic bags in its recycling bins or at its recycling facility. Some retail outlets, such as Kroger, Wal-Mart and Target, have recycling bins at their stores in which people can deposit plastic bags.
The library still doesn't accept every plastic bag. Produce bags from grocery stores or sandwich bags from Subway are too thin and tear too easily to turn into plastic yarn.
The latest data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, from 2015, count more than 800 people who are homeless in central Arkansas. In 2013, volunteers for the agency counted more than 1,000 people who were homeless.
Experts speculated that the difference in totals could be a real drop in the number of people who are homeless in the area, or it could have something to do with the weather on the days in which the counts were made.
The Van, a local nonprofit that aids people who are homeless, received several dozen plastic bag mats to distribute a few years ago, said Aaron Reddin, The Van founder and executive director. Reddin didn't remember who had sent them.
Not everyone wanted to take a mat, he said, although they were more popular with people who sleep on concrete surfaces than with people who sleep in homeless camps. But often, he said, people didn't carry around the mats forever.
"I think a lot of the problem with them before is that they would get left all over the place and they would become litter," Reddin said.
The mats aren't easily mass produced. Each mat requires about 500 to 700 plastic bags and hours of manpower to make.
Making one mat might take two months for a person inexperienced in crochet, said Shelbie Reed, a library assistant.
Volunteers last Saturday produced two mats -- blue, red, yellow, green and white woven together -- in their afternoon of work. Library staff want to have more events like Saturday's, and they hope to attract more volunteers on other days.
Anyone who'd like to can go to a table on the first floor of the library and crochet from a basketball-sized ball of plastic yarn -- called "plarn" -- or cut bags into plarn for as long as they want.
Library staff have recently asked North Little Rock High School students who go to the library after school to pitch in. Some have helped.
Theilig said he'd like to produce two new mats each week, but he and library assistant Cory McEwen noted the number produced will depend on the number of volunteers and the number of plastic bags donated.
"If it turns out to only be one a month, that's better than nothing," Theilig said.
Metro on 03/27/2017