Girlie Linao

Filipino beneficiaries of the livelihood training program making fashion accessories and stuffed teddy bears from discarded materials at a workshop. (EPA Photos/Rolex Dela Pena)

Turning Philippine Trash Into Fashion Treasure

Mylene Virtucio, a mother of seven, used to earn a living by rummaging through Manila’s tons of stinking garbage for scrap materials that she then sold to junk shops.

The money she earned from scavenging was never enough, but she had little choice as she struggled to raise her children at a dump in the slum district of Tondo.

More than 10 years later, Virtucio, 39, still earns her living from trash, but now by making fashion accessories that are fast becoming hot items abroad.

“I didn’t want to be a garbage scavenger then, but I had to do it because life was hard and we needed money,” she said. “What I’m doing now is so much better. I earn more and it’s decent work.”

Virtucio has been making necklaces, bracelets and earrings from paper beads produced from glossy magazine pages since 1998 when she joined a livelihood-training program of the Philippine Christian Foundation, a charity group.

She earns as much as 600 pesos ($13) a day — six times more than from the back-breaking work at the dump, where she picked out pieces of metal and plastic.

With her current income, she has been able to buy a steel bed frame, second-hand plastic cabinets, a television set and an electric fan that are now crammed into her 8-square-meter shack near a waste-segregation facility in Tondo.

“I can now even afford to have electricity in here,” she beamed, ignoring the stench coming from outside.

More than 120 mothers from slum areas have been trained by the foundation to make accessories under its Winning Over Waste brand. Bags, wallets, coin purses, and pencil and eyeglass cases are made from ring-pull tabs from cans, toothpaste tubes, discarded computer keyboards or plastic wrappers.

Glossy magazine pages are cut into tiny strips and rolled into shell-shaped beads. The beads are then dipped into varnish before being assembled into fashion accessories.

Charity founder Jane Walker said the foundation used to buy glass and gemstones for the jewelry, but the global recession pushed it to look for less expensive raw materials.

“It took us a long time to get it right,” Walker, from Britain, said. “But now we’ll never buy any materials ever again. We’re only ever going to use predominantly recycled materials for our products.”

“It really makes sense for the community to make money out of garbage since they have been doing that for the last 25 to 30 years, except now they can make 10 times as much than they could make in a week before,” she said.

Manila produces more than 7,000 tons of garbage every day, which is dumped in open landfills in the capital and nearby provinces, including at a 10-hectare dump in Tondo. More than 30,000 people live nearby and rely on the trash for their livelihoods.

Aileen Balena, 20, has been sewing teddy bears made from recycled stuffing at the foundation’s workshop since October. Before she learned to sew, she and her husband made charcoal from wood salvaged from the dump or demolished houses.

“Making charcoal is hard,” she said. “You’re in front of the fire all the time, and I always go home dirty and smelling bad. Income was never consistent. Sometimes, it was good. Most of the time, it was not enough.”

Balena said she hoped to be able to save enough money to buy her own house where she could raise a family. “I’m still young and I have lots of dreams,” she said as she sewed the head onto a teddy bear’s body. “Someday, I want to own a house away from the garbage.”

Walker said most of the Winning Over Waste products were exported to Britain, while a couple of orders have come in from New York and Los Angeles.

She said prospects for more clients were bright. A company that owns a chain of craft shops in Europe wants to buy loose paper beads from the foundation.

“We’d love to get into wholesale because then we can give more people work,” she said

Marcel Clado, manager of the foundation’s livelihood program, said demand was high during the Christmas holiday. “We made 10 shipments of assorted accessories, bags and teddy bears to London in the last quarter of 2009 alone,” he said.

The foundation’s aim is to help families at the dump to get out of poverty and someday leave the landfill, Walker said.

“It would just be really good if we can help families move out,” she said. “We could help them buy land, help them build homes. As long as they have the steady income making our products, it would really be good.”

During a recent visit to London, Walker collected raw materials for two months of production. “When I came back, my suitcase had two pairs of jeans and 18 kilograms of ring-pull tabs and about 200 used toothpaste tubes,” she said. “I couldn’t bring any more clothes. This is livelihood for our community.”

 

Deutsche Presse-Agentur

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