Monday, March 18, 2024

WOMEN’S MONTH FEATURE

KURE for the environment
one plastic sheet at time

In times when coastal clean-ups report sacks upon sacks of plastic garbage lifted out from the sea, the shores and near households, members of the Kalipunan ng Liping Pilipina (KALIPI) Tagbilaran City are taking matters in their own hands.

This is KURE’s way of tackling the environment, empowerment and economic development.

Composed of solo parents, battered women, women with physical difficulties, plain housewives and unemployed or underemployed women also threatened by the wanton disregard of people in discarding plastics, the group of 225 women decided to be part of the solution by venturing out into a livelihood from collected garbage.
Seeing the scattered plastic bags not just as eyesores littering in our streets and communities, we looked for ways these can be recycled or repurposed to give these a new lease in life, shares Rowena Bernales, who was experimenting repurposing dried leaves into decorative materials then.

Bernales, who was unemployed from Cogon District said anything she could do to help beef up the family income would be fair game.

It was simple and it was something that women would naturally do: keep plastic bags after using them, pick up those that they can find littering their communities and wash those that have dirt in them so they could be snipped into tiny strips to be later heat-pressed.

“In was in February of 2018, when the Plastic Recycling Project for Increased Women’s Income (PRP4IWI) introduced a non-conventional recycling project through innovation and technology to start off livelihood and improve lives of families,” Erickson Nangkil, product designer helping the women recalled.
With tons upon tons of plastic bags discarded every day, the challenge is even bigger in Tagbilaran: the gateway for tourists coming to Bohol.

What to do with the plastic and how technology and innovation can be used was another challenge, however, in partnership with Japan International Cooperation Agency, the Department of Trade and Industry, Department of Education and the City Government, the idea of heat pressing was presented by a Japanese volunteer Chrisato Kanno.

The next challenge was how to digitally fabricate a heat-press.

That time, another Japanese volunteer Shiro Takaki designed the heat-press machine which they fabricated locally.

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