Lucy Hornberger tells PK how Doy Bags combine recycling with ingenious design and fair trade principles to create the perfect shopping bag, lunchbox, backpack... to suit everyone's taste.

When your handbag proudly states that it contains 103 calories, zero grams of fat and protein and 100% of your daily Vitamin C requirement, you can be sure it’s something special! But in fact this handy nutritional information is far from the only thing that sets Doy Bags apart.

Doy Bags are made from recycled juice packs by a women’s cooperative in the Philippines. Not only does production of the bags prevent literally millions of juice packs ending up in landfill, or worse, being burnt in incinerators (thus giving off toxins), it also provides more than 200 women and their families with a stable livelihood and a fair wage.

When I first saw these amazing bags I immediately fell for them – and who wouldn’t, given the chance to carry a fabulously funky Tomato Sauce shopper, a pink Tutti-Fruitti backpack or a rather classy denim and juice pack beach bag!

This is surely eco-chic at its best, combining recycling and green awareness with ingenious design and fair trade principles to create – crucially – a great product that is both eye-catching and practical. Quality is important too. All the Doy products are strong and durable with robust zips and double stitched seams.

Collection Department

Juice pack drinks, which are ubiquitous in the Philippines and available in myriad flavours, are packaged in plasticised foil pouches (similar to the ‘Capri Sun’ brand in the UK). These are non-biodegradable and litter streets and waterways across the country. The Doy Bags cooperative, which is based near Manila, has its origins in a local ‘cleaning and greening’ environmental initiative. The resourceful women behind the project quickly saw opportunities to expand into developing 'livelihood opportunities from garbage'. Working together with the local council, a Recycling Centre was set up and local households were educated to sort their recyclable waste and sell it to the project. A range of juice pack bags and accessories was designed and produced and the cooperative was born.

Sewing Department

From small beginnings, the cooperative now has a workforce of over 200 local women, most of them from disadvantaged backgrounds and the main or only breadwinner for their families (in an area of high unemployment, most of their husbands are unable to find work). The cooperative is proud to function as a sort of extended family enterprise, and stresses the importance of education for the members' children. A scholarship fund (10% of profits) has been established to make this possible. No children or minors are permitted to work for the cooperative under any circumstances.

In addition to a fair and living wage, all cooperative members are encouraged to attend free skills training and personal development seminars, and receive additional incentives such as a weekly ration of five kilos of rice.

Cooperative members are divided into three teams – the buyers, who travel around the area buying (by weight) used juice packs from schools, dormitories, hospitals and private households; the washers, who sanitize the juice packs in a three-stage process and dry them; and the seamstresses, the most skilled members of the cooperative, who use industrial high speed sewing machines to transform the juice packs into a huge variety of colourful bags and home accessories.

	Lunchbox Voted BEST BUY by The Independent in their '10 Best Lunch Boxes' Feature, 5th Sep 2006

Working membership of the Doy Bags cooperative makes a real difference to people’s lives, elevating families from extreme poverty to a decent life. Continued success and sales of Doy Bags will enable the cooperative to fulfil its mission of providing more jobs for local women from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Great fun to use, good for the environment and good for the producers, you really can’t go wrong with a Doy Bag (and they make great gifts too!). From shopping bags to backpacks, lunch boxes to beach bags, there’s a style and a ‘flavour’ to suit everyone. For the home, there are aprons and tidy boxes too. Fruity or saucy, pink strawberries or ultra kitsch cartoons… Whatever your taste, I hope you’ll enjoy the range as much as I do!

Click here to view Doy Bags at The Natural Store >>