An intiative with heart: From bags to riches

A small - scale project to help an Indian slum by selling handbags made of discarded plastic has boomed into a million - grand industry with a heart.

It may sound hard to believe, but handbags for sale in some of London's fashionable boutiques started out as used plastic bags scavenged from the rubbish heaps of Delhi. They are the product of a cottage industry run out of the living rooms of a handful of houses in a Delhi slum. The plastic bags are ferreted out by the rag-pickers, the poorest of Delhi's poor, who make their living hunting for scraps in the rubbish of their richer neighbours.

They are then moulded together into single sheets of thick, durable plastic, stitched into handbags with bright, colourful designs, and sent off to boutiques in Britain, the US, France, Spain, and much of Europe.

It is all the result of an environmental and development project dreamed up four years ago by an Indian couple, Shalabh and Anita Ahuja, who run their own NGO, Conserve.

The plastic is stitched into brightly coloured handbags

Waste management is one of the biggest problems that India faces and Anita and her friends have been tackling the issue since 1998. They worked on a waste management project with low-income groups in Mandaoli (a Delhi slum) for nearly four years, and then started another project in Safdarjung. "We collected waste from 500 houses to make compost in a municipal corporation park. That's when we realised how much plastic the city uses. So we started on the plastic bag project."

Conserve came up with the novel idea of turning used plastic bags into trendy handbags, shopping bags, wallets, tablemats and notepad covers. These are being snapped up by environment-friendly shoppers, who are happy to support an idea that has changed the lives of slum women and turned one of the banes of city life into a saleable product. The plastic bags are collected by women from east Delhi slums (Phoragaon, Yamuna Pusta and Mandaoli). Each day, they scavenge around the garbage bins, hunt in choked drains and pick up flyaway trash on traffic-infested roads. The plastic they collect is thoroughly washed, dried, separated by colour and arranged in trays; the women wear masks while working to protect themselves from plastic toxicity. The plastic bags then go into a machine designed by Conserve, which presses them into thick sheets. These sheets are then bought by Conserve.

Says Anita:

"I have started looking at plastic differently. Much to my family's embarrassment, I get out of my car at traffic lights and pick up colourful plastic bags from the roads. It's very difficult to colour plastic and we use no dyes. Colourful bags make the sheets more vibrant."

She admits that most people are hesitant about buying bags made from waste plastic. "We tell the women making the sheets that they must wash the plastic very carefully, for buyers will be looking at both quality and cleanliness." Conserve's efforts were amply rewarded when the products they recently put up during a special event at Dilli Haat (a permanent crafts bazaar) were all sold out. The products sold at reasonable prices — handbags between Rs 300 and Rs 1,500, shopping bags from Rs 50 to Rs 250 and wallets between Rs 100 and Rs 300.

They freely admit that they never dreamed that what they envisaged as a small-scale project for a single slum would turn into a profitable enterprise, exporting all over the world and with an annual turnover of around £100,000.

Today, Conserve's handbags contribute to the livelihoods of more than 300 people, from the rag-pickers paid for collecting the plastic bags, to the skilled labourers who sew the handbags. The NGO employs eight rag-pickers directly, as its core team, but buys plastic bags from a far larger number.

Anita and her team are thrilled with the compliments they have been receiving. "If we count the human hours put into the project, I can safely say we have invested roughly Rs 1 lakh in it. We hope we can get a grant to buy sewing machines. At present, women gather in the homes of those who have machines and this slows down our production. We also need more sheet-presser machines and we need to expand our collection centres. But more importantly, the women who work for Conserve should become the shareholders of the company. If that happens then in our small way, we may get people to see throwaway plastic bags differently."

With inputs from The Star, BBC.co.uk and The Hindu.