Trashy totes and wallets help clean up Indonesia

JAKARTA (Reuters Life!) - The hippest totes and wallets for Indonesia's environmentally conscious are stylish and practical, and made from trash.

While Indonesia may be one of the worst carbon emitters on the planet, a group of Indonesians are doing their bit to re-use packaging for food, drinks, toothpaste and detergent by turning it into trendy totes, make-up bags, and other containers.

"Landfills are filled with trash that nobody wants," said Ann Wizer, an American visual artist and environmentalist who set up the "XS Project" in 2002 to put old waste to new use.

"I'm going to find a way to use them up, to further prolong the life of the packaging to keep them out of the landfill and to keep people from burning this."

Trash pickers supplying XS Project scour the garbage containers for usable material, wash it with soap and water, then leave it out to dry in the sun. The clean plastic is then stitched into various designs and sold.

For a kg of clean plastic, the project pays five times the amount other recyclers pay for hard plastic, allowing trash pickers to earn enough money to send their children to school, Wizer said.

STRONG MESSAGE

Wizer, based in the Philippines, started to use garbage in her artwork in the early 1990s after her Manila home was flooded because the sewers in the area were clogged with trash.

But she soon decided to go for a bigger audience, turning the brightly colored packaging into everyday household goods.

"You don't get a big strong message out by staying in a white-walled gallery that 10 people go to a day," Wizer said.

"I have to see these products out in the world, in the public domain. So let's step out of the gallery for a while, from the very privileged culture world and get out in the public."

Five years later, her Jakarta-based project employs eight local craftsmen and outsources production to two other sites, producing more than 100 bags a month.

The finished goods are sold in Indonesia, and in foreign markets including Singapore and the United States.

Since 2002, XS Project has re-used 18 metric tons of trash.

"The irresponsibility lies in the fact that they are not cleaning it up. So we have to. It's a public problem, a public nuisance."

(Editing by Sara Webb and Miral Fahmy)