Last year, I wrote about plastic bags and their impact on Bali. This article explores some of the imaginative and attractive recycled bags that have been developed on Bali over the past few years.
It’s been less than three decades since the plastic shopping bag became common in the west, and much less than that for the developing world. An estimated 500 billion plastic bags are used annually, or almost one million per minute. (Carrefour in Jakarta is said to get through a million plastic bags a day in its seven outlets; China consumes several billion daily.) Almost none of these bags are recycled. Americans use about a fifth of the world total, an amount that requires about 12 million barrels of oil to produce.
As we’re all too well aware, plastic bags in Bali are routinely buried, burned or thrown over walls or into rivers. Drifting downstream they enter the sea, where they contribute to over 100,000 sea turtle and other marine animal deaths every year, and add to a huge floating continent of debris in the Pacific Ocean.
The plastic bags that do get recycled through EcoBali, Jimbaran Listari, ABC Recycling and other organizations are trucked to Java to be shredded and made into new bags and other products. Yet traditional recycling is not an ideal solution, given the energy it requires to collect, process, transport and make them into new products.
I once calculated that at least a million plastic bags were being thrown away in Bali every day. Very likely the figure is a lot higher. So it’s beyond ironic that a small company in Bali making a textile from recycled plastic bags can’t find enough raw material to meet its orders.
A couple of years ago Sam Miller co-founded Bombastic Plastix along with Ibu Niluh Indrawati. Sam, a longtime tinkerer and entrepreneur in sectors that included product development and design, has refined a process that creates a non-woven textile from re-used plastic bags. This tough, attractive material is sewn into stylish bags, wallets and other products. Niluh looks after the business, computer and accounting side of things and most of the design concept. Sam is responsible for the production and technical end.
Compared to recycling most materials, this process of taking the recycled plastic from the raw state to a finished product (making a bag into a bag, as it were) takes minimal energy. “If you want to recycle a plastic bottle in Bali, you collect it, clean it, chip it, then truck it to Java to be melted down and made into a new product,” Sam explains. “There’s lots of transportation and energy involved. From that viewpoint, our product is pretty green. It doesn’t have to travel far or go through many steps. We use a combination of heat and pressure to bond the bags together. A polymer by nature wants to join with itself, so we work with the plastic’s own properties and characteristics.”
“Over 80% of our products are made from recycled materials. Some are completely recycled except for the thread,” Niluh points out. “The inter-liners are also recycled and a little new vinyl is used for the trim.” The attractive designs aren’t dyed or screen-printed, but cut from recycled plastic and laminated onto the bags.
The business supports seven full-time staff and over 30 contract workers. The company’s attractive, well-designed and sturdy products include computer cases, organizers, shopping bags, gym bags, and carry-on luggage, some with enough insulation to keep perishables cool. They also design and make packaging for eco-friendly products and mailing envelopes. “I’d like people to buy the products because they’re cool, not just because they are environmentally correct,” Sam stresses. He’d like to expand into other areas such as making vapour barriers for construction. He’s also interested in making landfill liners made from recycled plastic bags to protect the water table. He reckons they would be cheap to make and profitable to sell, as would pond liners, shade cloths and aquaculture liners. Are there any venture capitalists out there who would like to do well while doing good?
Bombastic Plastix’s great bags are available in the Third Born shops in Legian and Kuta, at Surfer Girl outlets and at Bali Buddha. The bags sell well in Australia, Europe and the United States, but the market in Bali is still being developed.
Back to the supply problem. “You’d think it would be the easiest thing in the world to get a steady supply of used plastic bags here in Bali, but it’s a nightmare,” Sam explains. “We’re now taking bags from the general waste stream but we’re looking for a source of clean, used plastic bags and we pay Rp 6,000 a kilogram.” If you’ve got any solutions or ideas or would like to become a distributor, please contact Sam at sam@bombasticplastix.com and check out www.bombasticplastix.com for more information.
The concept of using recycled newspaper to make carrier bags was probably first conceived about five years ago by the owners and staff of popular Bali Buddha Café. “We needed a packaging solution and wanted to help support a staff member with a handicapped brother,” explains Bali Buddha co-owner Brenda Ritchmond. “We designed the carrier bag and the family began to make them for us. Now five people are employed make the bags for our two outlets. We use about 5,000 a month.”
Three years ago Brenda wanted to help a young woman who had just lost a baby, so she began to give her sewing work. Kadek now designs and makes eye-catching carrier bags, wallets and other items from hard-to-recycle packaging like soap wrappers, noodle packets, snack packages and coffee packets. She encourages children to collect them from the warungs and pays them a small fee. The products can be bought at Bali Buddha, but Indonesians have also started to buy them directly from Kadek.
Last year the iconic Bali Buddha recycled newspaper bag caught they eye of Dave Allen, who has a curiosity shop in California. “I’ve been trying to find low-impact packaging for a long time,” he explains. “I was impressed by the newspaper bags and decided to use them in my business. I developed a project along with Plentung, a bright young man from a poor family in Karangasem.” Plentung immediately saw the advantages of establishing a cottage industry to supply Dave with bags he needed. Now his extended family and many other villagers are involved in producing bags for Dave, who packs them into the empty spaces of his containers. Plentung sources used newspapers from hotels and finds cardboard for liners and reinforcement. His father makes twine for the handles by twisting together banana fibres. Using wooden blocks as templates, Plentung developed three different sizes of bags.
I recently visited his modest family compound just east of Tirtagangga. About 20 people were busily cutting, folding and gluing bags in the shady porches of the buildings. Usually the workforce is about 60 people, but the others were at a village wedding. “If I can source enough newspaper, my target is to make about 25,000 bags a month,” Plentung explains. “Dave is currently buying all the bags, although we’re now making more than he needs and are looking for other customers.”
“On my first visit after the project started, I was very impressed by the impact the additional income was having on the family,” Dave notes. “I was especially moved by a young girl who’d been having epileptic fits about once a week for as long as anyone could remember. Now that she’s been working with the other villagers making bags, she hasn’t had a seizure in over a month. No one knows why, but the work seems to do her good.”
The project has improved the lives of the villagers by putting a few more rupiah in every family’s pocket. All the children now have school supplies, and all the families can now afford some fish to accompany the rice, vegetables and peanuts they grow. Plentung also supports a project for 55 children which provides classes in yoga, meditation and traditional dance,. Next year, he plans to teach them to use a computer. He’s already organized them to clean up the village streets and separate the waste into recyclables.
Plentung and his village can make bags of recycled newspaper of any size. Contact him at 081 337 285 342 or plentungpesawan@yahoo.com
The best solution, of course, is not to use plastic bags at all. But it’s a slow, steep learning curve. Say No To Plastic (SNTP), an Ubud-based initiative to reduce plastic bag use by at least 15%, targets major retailers in Bali with waste education and reduction programs. The SNTP organizers have recently signed a 6-month agreement to work with one of Bali’s largest supermarkets, Hypermart Mal Bali Galeria. Under the agreement, SNTP is providing a step-by-step retail campaign strategy and support service to Hypermart, with the aim of reducing the amount of single-use plastic bags handed out at the cashier. The campaign is called HyperGreen, and is aimed at encouraging consumers to bring their own shopping bags, refuse plastic bags, and adopt a green lifestyle. The strategy includes introducing reusable cloth bags for customers, staff support and training. The HyperGreen campaign was launched November 27. For more details, contact saynotoplastic@gmail.com or visit Bali Cantik Tanpa Plastik Campaign on Facebook.
Dragons in the Bath, a collection of Ibu Kat’s stories, is available in Bali from Dijon in Kuta, Ganesha Books at Biku in Seminyak and Ganesaha Books and selected shops in Ubud. It can be ordered nationally and internationally through www.dragonsinthebath.com <http://www.dragonsinthebath.com>
