Philippines women turning rubbish into high fashion

Women from Manila's shanty towns are working for a British-led charity is turning rubbish into sought after fashion items sold in high-end London shops. At a warehouse near the city’s notorious Smokey Mountain rubbish dump about 20 women cut pieces of cloth and other materials salvaged from the rubbish to make teddy bears. Others work on handbags and purses made from thrown away toothpaste tubes.Just a few miles from the presidential palace, Smokey Mountain has come to symbolise the wall-to-wall poverty in this south east Asian nation of 92 million people.

"This bag costs about £100 pounds sterling or more in London," said Jane Walker, a former publishing executive from Southampton. Ms Walker gave up her lavish lifestyle in 1996 to set up the Philippine Christian Foundation in Manila after seeing the plight of the poor here. Depending mainly on corporate donations, the non-profit foundation provides livelihood projects, health services and free education to the children of families living on the dump.About 200 bags are currently being shipped to boutiques in London, she said and the foundation was struggling to meet demand. "I had to turn down three shops in London ordering our products because we keep running out." There are also talks going on over a deal to supply a major luxury chain and negotiations with an American company to produce shoes and slippers using discarded car tyres.

Dubbed Manila's "angel of the dumps," by the city’s press, the 45-year-old single mother's tireless efforts have helped entire families out of crushing poverty.Parts of the rubbish dump have been levelled to make official settlements over the past decade, but there is still a large part that remains a permanent open dump for tons of daily waste from Manila's 12 million inhabitants. Before Ms Walker set up her foundation, swarms of children and entire families would descend on the rubbish, scavenging for items to sell at junkshops. But through Walker's efforts, a school was built, an abandoned warehouse was transformed into a livelihood centre where hot meals were offered and the children were given a semblance of a normal life.

Then, when the global financial crisis hit last year and many donors cut back on corporate social responsibility work, Ms Walker was forced to find creative ways to raise new funding. She came up with the idea of turning rubbish into fashion accessories and began getting members of the community, mainly mothers, to start sewing together ring tabs from aluminum cans into tiny purses. Now many come up with their own creative ideas. "This has helped me a lot because I can work and watch my grandchildren go to school," Martha Dominguez, 60, told Agence France Presse news service. "We lived surrounded by trash all our lives, not knowing that we could have made it into money."

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children