Photo: Urban Poor Associates (UPA) (flickr)

In March of 2008, over 250 people from 34 different countries gathered to talk about trash in Bogotá.

Why? These people came together to attend the First International and Third Latin American Conference of Waste Pickers in Bogota, Colombia. The goal of the conference was to help waste pickers organize around the challenges they face and learn from each other's experiences.

Worldwide there are about 15 million people that earn their living by collecting and sorting through trash in order to find materials that can be recycled, resold and reused. Some waste pickers are actually hired by local governments and businesses to sort through trash to find recyclables, others do it illegally.

But waste pickers want more respect from their communities. They see waste picking is a business that is saving hundreds of thousands of pounds of salvageable material from landfills each year.

Conference participants devised strategies to work with their communities to legalize their trade in places where sorting through trash is prohibited. They broke out into groups and agreed on goals specific to their region. For instance, waste pickers in Asia are working to integrate the voices of environmental activists into their work. Waste pickers in Latin America plan to collaborate and organize with each other by using a community website.

Conferences like this one will help draw attention to the waste pickers' cause, as well as allow them to organize and establish a unified voice. Silvo Ruiz, a legal representatives working with the waste pickers, echoed the call for greater unity among waste pickers in the conference's final report.

We waste pickers will keep our hands in the garbage bag that provides our livelihood, but our head outside of the bag, to fight for the public policies we need to improve our situation. Intermediaries wait comfortably in their warehouses, and [w]aste [p]ickers do the hard work of collecting. Waste should not be for the intermediaries, but for the waste pickers who do all the work. United, we can fight for what is needed.

An example of the "trashion" bags created by XSProject. Photo: XSProject

Used plastics from Indonesia are being saved from landfills. And former waste pickers are turning these plastics into fashion bags to sell in Singapore, Australia and the United States.

The fad known as "trashion" has gained mainstream acceptance with chic, urban designers worldwide now posting big profits by using leftover, discarded and found materials to create jewelry, clothing and housewares.

The type of plastic used in the bags is found in packaging ranging from soft drinks to detergent to toothpaste and is mostly aluminum bonded to plastic. Use of this plastic is on the rise because it costs companies less to produce, but because it's not recyclable, as hard plastic bottles are, it ends up costing the public more in terms of pollution and environmental damage.

So, the XSProject began as a way to recycle these plastics. Ann Wizer is an artist and environmental activist, who while living in the Philippines had the idea to use trash as her primary medium. This art progressed into developing the XSProject, a non-profit organization which buys plastics from trash pickers and trains trash pickers themselves to make the bags, providing much needed wages. Proceeds from sale of the bags go directly to help the trash-picker communities by providing assistance for daily needs, scholarships and health protection.