Carry a bag made from used cartons or wear jewellery crafted from magazines. Plan@Earth’s Upcycling Unlimited fashions wearables from used materials

It takes three days to weave a bag, by hand, out of used toothpaste tubes. These have to be slit open, washed and dried before being cut into strips, folded and then woven. Similarly juice and milk cartons become bags and magazines and flyers transform into jewellery. Tougher-to-recycle/upcycle plastic carry bags, called ‘50 paise’, are woven with cotton threads to become laptop sleeves and totes on a loom used to weave doormats. The effort that goes into upcycling at Plan@Earth is much more than what it takes to chuck a used toothpaste tube into the bin. It is a voluntary organisation involved in waste management, creating awareness and upcycling.

catch ‘em young Plan@Earth works with a few schools such as Rajasree School (Aluva), St John’s (Thiruvaniyoor) and Govt. LP School (Udayamperoor), collecting plastic waste that the students bring from their homes. The collection is done once a week (for instance if it is a Thursday then every Thursday of the month) every week, when the children have to get a particular grade of plastic waste. This way the onus of responsible disposal is on the user, and since it is via school parents would also be more conscious about how it is handled. The plan is to extend this to other schools and also get corporates to adopt schools.

Of the 64 or so grades of plastic and dry waste that Plan@Earth collects, around 40 can be recycled which leaves around 10-15-odd grades that are difficult to handle - either treating them locally is impossible or shipping to another location is not feasible.

As the toothpaste tubes, cartons and plastic packaging accumulated, they had to think of ways of dealing with it. “It was like they say, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. We just had to do something about it, so hit upon the idea of upcycling these and Upcycling Unlimited came to be,” says Sooraj Abraham, one of the founders of the Aluva-based voluntary organisation.

The far end of the first floor of the Plan@Earth office/upcycling unit at Millupady in Aluva is the work space. Four women work on the upcycling project six days a week from 9 am to 5 pm — Sabitha Manoj weaves a bag, Sharanya Ratheesh cuts cartons into thin strips while Najma Navas and Sabitha Martin sew on the two tailoring machines. In another corner, next to them, is a loom used to weave mats, and around them are bags of many shapes, sizes and techniques.

Means of self reliance

The finish of each of these products is impressive, it challenges commonly held notions of recycled/upcycled products. There is a fifth woman, Lissie Tomy who readies the raw material by washing, cleaning and drying the ‘raw material’. All of them live close by, and shyly confess to enjoying the challenge upcycling throws.

“This is good experience for us, especially when we attend exhibitions where products made by us are displayed, people buy them or are appreciative,” says Sabitha Manoj. Working here affords them a degree of financial independence as well.

Plan@Earth employs women who collect plastic waste from homes, which is then sorted and shipped for further waste treatment. These women were chosen from among the collectors and sorters, and trained for a month before Upcycling Unlimited started production in July, 2016. Sooraj clarifies that they only provide support— training, help with marketing and space, “The aim is to increase the life cycle of plastic.”

noteworthy Kochi-based Papertrail started by Diwia Thomas upcycles newspapers into bags made by, among others women in shelter homes, jails and orphanages.

Artist–poet Radha Gomaty in collaboration with a rural women’s neighbourhood collective headed by Asha Santosh in Cherthala has been upcycling textile waste into a range of user-friendly bags and pouches for nine years now. Once called ‘SangMitra’ it is now Slingit! in collaboration with SPARCS Studio.

The revenue that Upcycling Unlimited generates is for the women, none of it goes to them, he underlines. The main market for the products is the exhibition circuit, they are contemplating going online.

Help at hand

Helping and guiding these women in their upcycling venture is Sabna Salim, who works at Plan@earth. She had no experience in upcycling when she started, but over the years she has developed expertise — be it design or product development— helping and working with the women.

It is her keen eye that ensures that the products are perfect. “We had students from a design institute in Jaipur who gave us suggestions and also taught some things. Those ideas widened the scope of the products that we could create,” she says.

R&D, for instance, involved going to traditional weavers, learning and then devising ways to adapting the knowledge to the material they had at hand – in this case toothpaste tubes and cartons.

Earlier they used to make mats out of tailoring waste but have stopped temporarily as these (usable pieces) are now hard to come by. The prototypes are tested for durability and customers can return the bags, “We tell them to give it to us once they are done, we can always recycle and reuse,” says Sooraj.