How Your Purchase Helps

XSProject: Doing Good Things With Trash

What your Purchase is Supporting

Background

XSProject (Jakarta, Indonesia) was founded by an American artist and environmental activist in 2002, and is based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Their mantra is to “do good things with trash”.

XSProject designs fashionable and functional accessories (hand bags, totes, zipper portfolios, etc) made from plastic waste it obtains from numerous trash pickers in Jakarta by paying well above market price.

The accessories are assembled by unskilled people who are hired and trained. The accessories are then sold to consumers as fashionable, functional products and as support for environmental awareness and social responsibility.

The Trash Pickers

There are an estimated 350,000 – 450,000 trash pickers in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.

Most of them undocumented and living on a monthly income of about US$ 30 to 35 per family. Unlike valued “sanitation workers” in many other countries who have insurance, benefits, uniforms, decent salaries, vacations and enjoy social recognition, these migrant populations are “invisible” living off the droppings of our consumer habits.

Although we depend on their services to continually clean our surroundings, increasing consumer appetites have put an ever growing strain on the environment. Proper recycling is nonexistent in much of Southeast Asia while trash pickers look for items that can be sold for recycling for their fragile incomes.

XSProject purchases plastic waste materials from trash pickers at above market price, thus providing them with additional income

The Craftspeople

XSProject is a proactive design "laboratory" with roots in art and innovation. We continually play with newer more complex designs, while experimenting with the inherent properties of different packaging materials. The highly skilled artisans working in XSProject Foundation make our complicated products like our one-of-a-kind shoulder bags. We encourage the talents in each one of them, which stimulates the team to find new possibilities while our crafts people further develop their unique sense of color and pattern designs.

Equally as important as creativity, we try to refine our production process to ensure high international standards in cleanliness, top quality and productivity in our own workshop.

With our multiple concerns at XSProject, two of our interconnected goals are to:

Maximize the amount of waste we can take out of our surroundings and prevent it from polluting the environment
Maximize the creation of sustainable livelihoods

XSProject's production concept is to provide jobs for those with few income opportunities. We seek out, train and strengthen existing groups, teaching them our particular methods of working with trash, while providing them with product orders and new income. Our method provides many individuals with new confidence and livelihood possibilities.

When training a new group, we start them off with our simplest products while ensuring their understanding of our strict washing standards and quality control. Each group produces XSProject goods according to their expertise.

The Problem

Indonesia is a country rich in natural resources and yet the Indonesian Minister of Health recently stated that adequate nutrition is still a main problem for Indonesia. She said about 350,000 out of 4 million babies are underweight. About 5 million out of the 18 million Indonesian children under 5 years old are malnourished, while 10 out of 31 million school-going children suffer malnourishment.¹There are approximately eighty million Indonesians living on less than one dollar per day²and poverty continues to rise. The 5.5% economic growth rate in 2006 and the forecasted GDP growth at 6.2%³ in 2007 are insufficient to create the jobs needed to bring the millions out of poverty in the near future. Indonesians who are poor are more likely to have poor health and early death. At

the same time, unhealthy Indonesians have a more difficult time working and sustaining a job, making it more unlikely they will break the family cycle of poverty.

The poorest families send their children to madrasah, or religious day schools. They do this as a choice of last resort, in general. They do not have the financial means to go to government sponsored schools, which require fees and family expenditure on books and uniforms. The most at risk students are the children at these schools. Not only are their families poor and often uneducated, but the schools themselves rely on community support to operate. Unfortunately, the resources of the surrounding communities are minimal and the madrasah suffer. Often there is not clean water or adequate sanitation. This, of course, creates a breeding ground for disease, an unhealthy environment for the madrasah students.

Health and education are building blocks for a future healthy economy in Indonesia. This is recognized in The United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).⁴These indicators are used to measure and monitor progress in development and alleviation of poverty. More than one third of the indicators focus on health and education.

Helping Children and Their Families

Uplift International recognizes the need for the poorest children to improve their nutrition, health education and access to clean water A classroom in one of the madrasahs

and adequate sanitation. We have developed a program targeting some of the neediest children in Jakarta, Indonesia-- those attending the madrasah, or religious day schools. The program focuses on 6,000 students in 30 schools. It is guided by the Millennium Development Goals of the UN, which are universally accepted goals directed at meeting the needs of the worlds poorest people by the year 2015.⁵ Our program helps the most vulnerable children attain better nutrition and health. None of our programs involve any religious activities or themes.

The Program:

Our program first supplies food supplementation to the students and teaches them about good nutrition. Caretakers need to be educated too so that food prepared at home is nutritious. Our program includes an educational component that focuses on the mothers, caretakers and the teachers.
We supply water filtration systems and toilets to the madrasah so their environment is healthy and their risks of infectious diseases are less. With good nutrition, healthy environments and knowledge about healthy behaviors, such as hand washing, madrasah children will be healthier and better students.
The health education component teaches the students, mothers and teachers about nutrition, clean water and sanitation and how healthy behaviors are important for good health and optimal learning.
The program creates and trains community teams to monitor the health and nutrition of these at-risk children and advocate for improved local government support for them.
The program works to increase the general community knowledge and demand for better health and nutrition information and services, especially in the poorest communities.

Sustainability

This program is innovative because it has a model for sustainability. Uplift International has created a partnership with XSProject that provides long-term revenue to sustain and expand the program through the sale of the accessories on this web site. An investment in the program will benefit the students in the madrasah and train the teachers and administrators to help future students. It is a capacity building endeavor. The Uplift International-XSProject partnership is revenue generating and creates a solution to the longstanding challenge faced by programs that aim to provide aid and economic development. Often good intentioned projects end prematurely, because funding cannot be sustained and donors cannot commit to long-term support. Our model requires initial investment only. Uplift has the business model - a revenue generating mechanism - to sustain and expand the child health program.

¹Kompas Daily January 26, 2007

²The Economist, “Poverty in Indonesia, Always with them, Sep 14th 2006

³ World Bank

⁴UN Millennium Development Goals

⁵ UN Millennium Development Goals

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