“Bas­ura” means “garbage” in the Phil­ip­pines, but change the ‘s’ to a ‘z’ and you’ve got BAZURA, giv­ing “garbage” an air of soph­ist­ic­a­tion and chan­ging the way we think about waste.

Women’s Co-operative Phil­ip­pines | Photo by Sarie Santiago

Bazura Bags, a Cana­dian com­pany, has been work­ing closely with a women’s craft co-operative in the Phil­ip­pines to trans­form garbage into fash­ion­able hand­bags. This form of eco-fashion is a per­fect example of “upcyc­ling”: the pro­cess of con­vert­ing waste mater­i­als or use­less products into new mater­i­als or products of bet­ter qual­ity or a higher envir­on­mental value.”

Bazura Tote Bags I Photo from http://www.bazurashop.com

The co-operative pays chil­dren from local schools to col­lect used juice con­tain­ers spe­cific to this region (mil­lions of which are estim­ated to end up in land­fills daily, as it is a mater­ial cur­rently not being recycled).  The women then san­it­ize the juice con­tain­ers and since they are made of a thin, flex­ible, metallic-looking mater­ial, they are able to sew or weave them into dur­able, unique hand­bags.  This pro­cess helps clean up the envir­on­ment around the city of Manila and other parts of the Phil­ip­pines, and helps to pro­mote a cul­ture of Fair Trade – the women work­ing as part of the co-op are also entre­pren­eurs, as they are all share­hold­ers of the co-operative.

Bazura Woven Bags I Photo from http://www.bazurashop.com

Bazura Bags sell their products online (from e-tailers includ­ing Pristine Planet and Zola Goods) and also retail to stores in around 15 coun­tries world­wide.  The styles of bags include hand­bags, mes­sen­ger bags, lunch bags, purses and many other accessories.

This model of sus­tain­able, community-focused entre­pren­eur­ship is spread­ing: the com­pany has now also begun work­ing with co-ops in Viet­nam to cre­ate a new line of tote bags, cre­ated from used advert­ising ban­ners made of a flex­ible PVC material.

There are many women’s craft co-operatives around East Asia that are using post-consumer mater­i­als and upcyc­ling them into high end, prof­it­able designer products which sell suc­cess­fully around the world.  Sup­port­ing these ven­tures makes a state­ment that goes way bey­ond fashion.

Do you know of any other pro­jects or design­ers in East Asia using upcyc­ling to make a dif­fer­ence for com­munit­ies and the envir­on­ment? Do you have ideas for how we can con­nect cre­at­ive com­munit­ies with design­ers and cata­lysts for sus­tain­able prac­tices? Share your dis­cov­er­ies below.