Spook Shield

Our product is a colorful blanket (a shield) that protects children ages 3-9 from various imaginary monsters and darkness of the night. It comes with a colorfully illustrated instructions booklet that a child and a parent can engage with.

Its key features are:
It is multicolored and has a glow in the dark Spook Shield logo that helps to keep ‘monsters’
away;
Its conveniently placed pockets are made to keep a child’s toy from falling out of the bed at night;
And it is made locally, 99 per cent out of recycled materials, including product packaging.

What gave us the idea.
Some children really don't like being left alone in the dark, and become anxious when the lights are turned off in their room. Instead of falling asleep, they become very alert, hearing goblins every time the house creaks, or burglars with each gust of wind outdoors.

Many parents try to help their child overcome her fear of the dark by leaving the child's bedroom lights on, or the hall light on and the bedroom door open (often leading to the light shining right in the child's eyes), only to find that it still takes over an hour for her to finally fall asleep. One of the main reasons this happens is that, as demonstrated in clinical studies, light directly affects the brain's inner clock, and delays sleep onset. The brain interprets the presence of light as a sign that it is still daytime, and therefore much too early for sleep. This results in longer time to sleep onset.

What made us choose to recycle clothes rather than making our product from recycled raw material.
For our group the reason was environmental. There is so much over production and excess in the world right now.

North-Americans are buying, and discarding, clothes more quickly than ever. The average North- American throws 54 pounds of clothes and shoes into the trash each year. That adds up to about 9 million tons of wearable’s that are sent into the waste stream, according to the Environmental Protection Agency — a 27% increase in a mere eight years. Although resale shops are a good option for clothes that still have some fashion value, and charities will take items that are well past their prime, there are still an awful lot of ink-stained dress shirts and moth-eaten t- shirts that find their way to the dump.
What to do with that favorite old shirt you ruined by inadvertently spilling a glass of red wine down its front, or that well-worn pair of slacks that finally split at the seams, or that dress you loved last year but now wouldn't wear to save your life?
Goodwill and the Salvation Army will not sell defective clothes or shoes, but they do offload them to textile recyclers, who either ship them to Third World countries where they may have a chance of a second life, or sort and resell them to textile "de-manufacturers" who can turn them into materials that can be worked into new materials, whether it's cleaning rags, carpet padding or rubberized playgrounds.
Forty-five percent of recycled clothes are sold to other countries, 30% are turned into cleaning rags and 25% are turned into fibers for stuffing or insulation, according to the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textile Assn.
Recycling clothes, rather than making them from raw material, saves 72% in energy costs and 76% in CO2 emissions.