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Philippines NGO Recycles Aluminum Drink Pouches to Raise Money

The foil fruit drink pouch is the latest way to deliver and sell drinks in the Philippines. They are fast replacing Coca Cola and Pepsi bottled drinks as the most popular school drink. But the foil pouches have a serious drawback as they are an environmental hazard.

However, the People's Recovery Empowerment and Development Assistance (PREDA) Foundation are recycling hundreds of thousands of discarded foil pounces. The recycling project has created lucrative livelihoods for abandoned mothers, survivors of sexual exploitation, youth rescued from prisons, students, and dozens of waste paper collectors and out of work sewers.

The sanitised and cleaned pouches are then given to the growing army of eager home-based sewers. Some are abandoned wives with hungry children. Others are recovering youth exploited in the sex industry. Some are skilled sewers out of work. But busy sewers they are. With skill and dexterity they turn the foil pouches into bright, attractive carrier bags, sun hats, back packs and wallets.

The adult sewers are all working in their own homes. They work in their spare time and the most skilled sewers can earn as much as 500 pesos a day. All are then delivered to the Fair Trade warehouse where they are checked for quality and then packed and shipped to Germany and Austria and Australia.

For more information, visit PREDA’s web sites at http://www.preda.net and http://www.preda.org. In Australia these products will be on sale in the Oxfam Community Aid Abroad shops in time for Christmas.

For more information, contact
Nigel Walsh
Oxfam Australia Marketing Manager
Phone: 61 (0) 88341 1422
Email: NigelW@oxfamtrading.org.au.