A group of young volunteers in Hanoi are improving the environment one bag at a time with an inventive form of recycling.

Hanoi-based 3R club members and students of Hanoi University of Technology pose with eco-bags on the school’s campus.

The members of Hanoi-based 3R Club (Reduce – Reuse – Recycle), have found a new use for old street banners.

They can be made into eco-bags which are reusable and play an important role in raising public awareness to reduce the use of plastic bags.

Launched in March, the project “Please, give me an eco-bag” started with a public call for old banners and canvas sheets to make into eco-bags, head of the project Dinh Thi Lan Ngoc says.

3R members wash the old banners then take them to the Thanh Nha Center for the Disabled, where 68 workers recycle the scrap material into useful shopping and school bags. The 3R team designs each bag using half a square meter of material.

Ngoc says they chose canvas for the eco-bags, because many banners are left hanging around the city getting damaged by the weather and going to waste.

“If we can use canvas to make ecobags, we’ll reduce waste from advertising while raising public awareness about environmental protection,” she says.

So far, the two-year project has been conducted at Hanoi University of Technology, Hanoi-Amsterdam High School, Thanh Cong Market, and organizations under the city’s Department of Natural Resources with students and housewives as its main targets.

According to Ngoc, during the first stage that will finish in January next year, they have hosted different activities to inform consumers of the dangers of plastic bags and promote their recycled bags.

They attended neighborhood meetings in Ba Dinh District, where the project was piloted to hold games and raffles using the eco-bags for prizes for housewives.

They also cooperated with the National Economics University to organize music and green fashion shows for students, and invited them to attend the canvas-for-eco-bag exchange program.

At Hanoi-Amsterdam High School, the 3R crew together with the Green Hanoi Ams Club presented the bags to students and called for them to save all the banners from school activities to exchange with 3R.

“We don’t dare to think about big changes, because the project is really small,” Ngoc had said in an interview with a local newswire.

“Our aim is to raise public awareness about reducing plastic bags as much as possible, and using bags of other materials instead.”

She says the club plans to cooperate with supermarkets to distribute and promote eco-bags to consumers for the project’s second stage.

Beautiful bags

Tran Thien Duc, who is in charge of the voluntary team under Hanoi University of Technology, says his school holds many outdoor activities, so they had lots of old banners to exchange with 3R for eco-bags.

“Honestly, when we received the eco-bags, I was so surprised how the waste canvas was turned into such beautiful bags of various shapes displaying the school’s logo and the youth union’s badge,” Duc says.

The bags will be distributed to the volunteer team so they can use them to promote environment protection at Hanoi’s suburban communes in the summer, he adds.

“Students love new stuff, so we find it easy to approach them,” Ngoc says. But she notes that it’s not so simple for many who are used to plastic bags.

While the project has more than one year to go, Ngoc’s club has already earned respect and appreciation from others.

“We appreciate the young people’s enthusiastic volunteer spirit for the community,” Chu Thi Thanh Nha, director of Thanh Nha Center for the Disabled, says. “By working with them, the disabled can learn new skills and make nice products.”

The 3R Club was established in December 2007 with more than 100 young members to implement 3R initiatives under the 3R Hanoi (3R-HN) project sponsored by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency.

So far, it has hosted many activities, including three Mottainai festivals where people can come and exchange or sell old things for charitable funds, gaining great attention from the public and the media.

VietNamNet/Thanh Nien