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By Ari Bloomekatz

SEATTLE — A small Seattle company uses old bicycle-tire inner tubes and seat belts to make messenger bags, putting its sustainable philosophy into business practice.

Scavenging through rows of beat-up cars at a wrecking yard near Boeing Field, Eli Reich looked for the perfect materials for the messenger bags made by his company, Alchemy Goods. "This is just long enough," Reich said as he cut and examined a seat belt from a mangled Toyota Tercel before moving on to the next junked car.

Reich's 2-year-old company turns the "useless into useful," he said, by making environmentally conscious products from materials about to be dumped in landfills.

Inner tubes from old bicycle tires are used to make the bags, and seat belts stripped from junked cars are used as shoulder straps. The company struggles to build a profitable enterprise while focusing on sustainability.

"Every day, you can make the decision to have a sustainable product or the cheapest product," Reich said.

Reich tries to make the messenger bags from as many recycled parts as possible. Because each bag is unique — made by hand from different recycled materials — he says it can take several hours to produce one.

Adding recycled items for even the smallest parts of the bags can make the process more arduous, Reich said.

And while not every single part is made from recycled material (the colored inside linings, for example, aren't), Reich says he tries to put sustainability and Alchemy's philosophy before hasty production when he makes any decision about the business.

Creating a successful small business is a daunting task, but companies like Alchemy Goods face special challenges, small-business advisers say. Those that make products based on environmentally friendly technologies can have trouble getting financing, said David Young of the Small Business Development Center in Seattle.

Lenders are often tentative about pouring money into a product that uses new technology or techniques that have not proved profitable in the market, Young said.

Shaw Canale, Cascadia Revolving Fund's executive director, said the organization was formed to help business owners who historically had trouble getting traditional bank loans.

Alchemy Goods is in the same position as many small organic farmers, Canale said: Products are more expensive to produce, so it's more difficult to compete in the market. Reliable buyers are harder to corner, too.

Small businesses that have developed innovative ways to build products need to pay attention to larger companies that could buy them out, Young said.

These companies often spend too long in the development process and not enough time securing buyers and marketing, so they don't have a market base when a larger company wants to take over, Young said. Companies like Alchemy Goods should "do as much business as they can within the market reach they have, and then if they still have room to grow and can attract the funding to do that, then they should," Young said.

Alchemy Goods was created a little over a year after Reich's own messenger bag was stolen. Reich said he has always tried to be a conscious consumer and buy environmentally friendly products.

When he didn't find the kind of replacement bag he wanted, Reich said he grabbed some old inner tubes from around his house and made one.

"Whoever it was that stole my bag — you were the inspiration for my imagination," Reich wrote on the company's Web site.

In 2004, Alchemy Goods sold 175 bags — its first year of business; 2005 sales were on track to double last year's.

Reich says it takes him about three hours to make a standard messenger bag that sells for $128. A larger company, he expects, could make a similar product cheaper and faster.

"The big challenge is prices to make the bags affordable," Reich said. "What makes it the most challenging is that labor is really expensive."