Brazilian recycling project gives women and homeless an income

The simple ring pull, or rather thousands of sacks of them are changing the fortunes of thousands of families in Brazil. Bottletop, an organisation in Salvador in Brazil uses tonnes of the metal loops to make their shiny handbags that have become popular with celebrities such as Peaches Geldof and the singers Annie Lennox and Natalie Imbruglia. A women’s collective in Salvador makes the handbags. And the project gives its women workers far better conditions and other career options than would otherwise be open to the women, who might otherwise work as maids or turn to prostitution. About 40 women work at the collective to make the bags and other fashion items, including belts and keyrings. It takes them about two months to learn the craft.Money made from selling the bags, which sell in Britain for between £30 and £70, is used to fund programmes to raise awareness about sexual health in the Third World.

Bottletop has been quietly growing in popularity since it started exporting the bags to Britain about 18 months ago. The initiative comes from an idea Cameron Saul had while working as a volunteer in Uganda. There he saw a bag made of bottletops in a market and thought there was potential to bring the idea to the West. The project was taken on by Mulberry, the luxury-handbag company founded by Saul’s father, and proved a hit. Lately after teaming up with music-industry talent scout, Oliver Wayman to make a series of albums to raise money for the cause, the pair have began work together on a new line of bags made from ring pulls. Wayman and Saul estimate that they have used more than 2m ring pulls since they started Bottletop. It takes about 1,000 ring pulls to make one bag and the process of putting it together takes a day.

When bottletops first started out, finding enough ring pulls was a problem but as word spread among Salvador’s homeless about a way to make some easy money, the shortage eased. “It’s nice that they know they can get a bit of money from bringing them to the centre,” said Saul, whose organisation pays £3 per kilogram of metal. “About 20% of the ring pulls we are given we can’t use,” said Wayman. “Those go back to be recycled. Brazil has a very good recycling system [it is estimated that 85% of the 9.5 billion cans sold in the country are recycled]. The rest are cleaned up and used in a variety of products.”

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children