Eco-Hip Handbags
Conserve employs hundreds of underprivileged women in Delhi to collect up to 6,000 discarded plastic shopping bags each day and deliver them back to the production facility. The bags are sanitized, sorted by color, and then arranged in beautiful patterns on a blank canvas.
The canvas is fed into a heating unit where the plastic is fused together to form a single, colorful sheet of Handmade Recycled Plastic (HRP). Each purse is created from a single sheet of HRP, so no two bags are exactly alike. More than 50 plastic shopping bags are recycled to produce each Conserve fair trade bag.
Fashion designers from London, Paris, and Milan have created handbag patterns (templates) for the women to cut from the HRP sheets, and then sew into stylish, European-style handbags. Current production is only 100 bags per day.
Conserve supports over 300 families via this fair trade model, which has become so popular that women have migrated from other cities to work for Conserve.
NOTE: No Two Bags Are Exactly Alike... since the bags are produced from individual sheets of Handmade Recycled Plastic, color patterns may vary slightly from the photos.
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