Ann Wizer, XSProject
More than 500,000 people in Indonesia attempt to make a living collecting and reselling garbage. Artist Ann Wizer lived above a colony of these trashpickers and inquired about what waste they could not sell: plastic drink pouches and other non-biodegradable plastics. Wizer began purchasing these scraps from the trashpickers and using them to create bags, book covers, and other products. Not only does she produce a useful, well-designed and beautiful product (everyone who sees the bags loves them), she supports trashpickers, creates jobs for the Indonesia’s poor, utilizes landfill-bound trash and educates all who come into contact with her products and operations about consumption and waste.
“Why are people still accepting products that end up in a landfill? ” Wizer asked, “We shouldn’t have them. Our task at hand is to find ways to keep these materials out of landfills by reusing them. I am not interested only in upcycling or making “sympathy” products – I want these goods to be fabulous, they need to be able to compete in markets.”
Wizer was saddened by the way corporations use South East Asia as a dumping ground. “Companies do whatever they need to according to law and developing countries generally don’t have decent environmental protection,” she said. An artist, Wizer launched the XSProject initiative as an art exhibition in Jakarta. “The show got a lot of press. But I was despondent after – here I am talking about poverty, corporate abuse, lack of awareness, education but I felt I was talking to the wrong people. That culture audience was not involved with any of these issues.” That’s when she decided to work with the poor directly.
“If people are desperately poor, they will abuse their environment. They have no choice…we started by picking up non-recyclable waste and training poor people to make new things out of waste.”
Photography copyright Elizabeth Finlayson [lizzieinmanila@hotmail.com], supplied by XSProject Foundation
