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| <back | home It's in the Bag— How a Central American community's making Books out of Trash by Katie Renz One of the first things Analea Brauburger noticed when she stepped off the plane into Honduras was the trash covering the airport parking lot. “Litter is a major detractor from the beautiful ‘naturaleza’,” the 27-year-old Peace Corps volunteer recently wrote in an email. With nearly half its landscape devoted to forest, Honduras is the greenest of all Central American countries, more tree-covered than even the eco-touristy Costa Rica. It’s also flowered with garbage: “The streets are filled with trash. People throw soda bottles and Styrofoam containers out the windows of buses without anyone blinking an eye.” Brauburger soon realized that brightly-colored chip bags accounted for much of the refuse. According to her informal field data, the average Honduran eats two bags of chips per day. In a country lacking a centralized waste collection system — no public trash cans and only the occasional city dump — household garbage ends up either littered or burned. She called the fumes a national health concern, saying she often gets migraine headaches as a result. Based on a fellow volunteer’s daily visits to health care clinics, she said respiratory ailments in children, babies, and adults are a growing problem. One afternoon, another Peace Corps volunteer showed her how to make a coin purse out these ubiquitous chip bags, a skill passed down from an organic farmer who himself was taught by someone in Mexico. It wasn’t long before Brauburger had employed two teenagers to pick-up the bags scattered throughout the village streets. They returned, two hours later, with 500. From this initial batch of litter, Brauburger created basurabags.org, a line of ten different designs, from clutch purses to book bags to ipod cases. Yet ultimately, she’s spearheaded much more: a classic example of a problem becoming a solution, of a resource rescued from waste, of using a single endeavor to address multiple issues. Whether among the tourists in Honduras’ Roatan Islands or New York City’s fashionistas, the bags were a hit. Woven into a pattern of multi-colored, shiny diamonds, these “Basura Bags” — literally “trash” bags — are eye-catching zig-zags of recycled rainbows; some have straps, some have zippers, all are unique. More important, Brauburger recognized that a burgeoning movement in her home country around ecologically- and socially-conscious consumerism provided a way to keep transforming discarded chip bags into an “hecho por mano” cottage industry. But prettying up the scenery and turning Third World trash into stylish accessories for funky-chic westerners was just the beginning of Brauburger’s project. “Throughout my two years of service I’ve been haunted by the fact that there aren’t books in the schools,” Brauburger said, explaining that the average Honduran has a sixth-grade level of education. She said the typical method of teaching is for students to copy whatever the teacher puts on the chalkboard. In a way, this isn’t necessarily a far cry from the rote memorization relied upon by uncreative teachers here in the States. But like the lack of a basic garbage system, the fundamental differences between North and Central America are huge. As Brauburger put it: “Hondurans are lucky to have a school building with functional lighting and desks with benches or chairs. Books come after that. Schools do not usually have libraries, nor do the towns.” It makes sense, then, that Brauburger funnels all the profits from selling Basura Bags toward buying textbooks; she stressed that basurabags.org will soon officially be a non-profit organization, and has never been considered a business. The bags are also a small step toward addressing another persistent national problem: poverty. Brauburger pays her workers four times what they would earn doing back-breaking labor in the fields, the most common job in the country. She employs ten Hondurans full-time; they work from their homes, often as a collective family effort. Brauburger said that one woman paid for a breast exam she had been unable to get for three years because she couldn’t afford one prior to working for basurabags.org. One teenager uses his wages to pay for high school. And, perhaps ironically, the bag-makers have the funds to afford a healthier diet, ending up eating more fruits and vegetables among the staple rice, beans, tortillas, and of course, chips. Constructing the bags, like most goods made outside of sweatshops, is time-consuming. The process involves cleaning the bags, cutting them into specifically-sized pieces, folding the pieces into chains, then putting the chains together with fishing line and adding zippers or straps if necessary. Many hands are responsible for the finished product, in what has become a sort of village-scale assembly line. What if Brauburger’s raw material gets over-exploited — all the once-littered chip bags successfully refashioned as durable, re-useable bags? For better or worse, she said this would “never happen! Eating these chips are part of the culture here.” The streets of her village, though, are now clean because of the project, and workers have to go to other towns to collect the bags. And just in case, she has contacted major chip companies, who assured her they have ample chip bag waste if needed. Brauburger’s stint with the Peace Corps is almost over, yet her commitment to basurabags.org is long-term, for “at least ten years,” she said. The project is a vital way for her to stay connected to her Honduran community while living in the States, especially since her closest friends are also employees. Fellow Americans have said they would pay “in the hundreds of dollars to know that these bags are making a difference.” Currently, prices range from $20 for a coin purse to $150 for a 15-by-8-inch tote, all of which is divided between wages and books. Upon returning to the States, Brauburger plans to sell the bags to boutiques in Los Angeles, Arizona, and Louisiana. “This is my single most incredible experience in Honduras,” the crafty entrepreneur beamed. “You can’t find a bag on the streets in my town any longer. They represent money and books to the people now.” Make sure to visit www.basurabags.org to check out the beautiful bags for books. Brauburger also, by the way, crochets items out of plastic bags. As for her own junk-food cravings, the author prefers those weird orange circus-peanut marshmallow things to chips, and she hates Smarties. Katie Renz is a regular contributor to HopeDance; a 14-year resident of Cambria now living in the Bay Area. She also freelances and can be contacted at k8ylizzie@hotmail.com. <back | top^ |