Trashy Bags

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Trashy Bags

Type	Non-profit Social Enterprise
Founded	2007
Location	8 Dzorwulu Crescent Accra, Ghana, West Africa
Coordinates	5°38′04″N 0°13′23″W
Key people	Stuart Gold, Managing Director Lydia Appiah, Director
Area served	Worldwide
Employees	60+ (November 2010)
Website	http://www.trashybags.org

Trashy Bags is a registered non-governmental organization (NGO) that recycles solid plastic waste into fashionable bags and gifts.^[1] The factory and showroom are located in Accra, the capital of the Republic of Ghana in West Africa. A British architect, Stuart Gold, established the organization in 2007.
The company employs over sixty Ghanaian workers^[2][3] to collect, clean and stitch plastic trash in the form of sachets that previously contained water and other beverages. With these, they create plastic bags, accessories, school supplies, and other products.

Some of the Trashy Bags products: A shopping bag made of used plastic water sachets and a hand bag made of discarded billboards.

The plastic sachets is a problem because local recycling initiatives and waste management infrastructure is not sufficient and most Ghanaian people throw their waste on the streets.
The company has recycled approximately 20 million sachets since its start in 2007 to prevent large environmental damage. Every month nearly 200,000 plastic sachets are collected and brought to Trashy Bags by a network of collectors^[4] employed by Trashy Bags. The Trashy Bags are sold at the showroom in Dzorwulu, Accra near the Kotoka International Airport, online, and exported^[5][6] to seven countries^[7] in Europe and the United States.
In 2011, Trashy Bags started using discarded billboards to produce their collection of bags and accessories called Ad Bags. In Ghana, used billboard are often burned or disposed in other environmentally harmful way. Trashy Bags uses this material to produce unique products, each being one of its kind.

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