Dini Mentari
IPMI International Business School
Amelia Naim Indrajaya
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Yanti involves her neighborhood, especially housewives in the area where she lives, to collect garbage bins in their houses and surroundings. He sorted out the organic waste processed into compost and the non-organic waste were sold to collectors. It turns out that plastic packaging does not sell for sale. The collectors only want to buy clear plastic, from mineral water bottle, plastic glass, cans, carton, and cardboard.
Luckily Yanti is appointed as a facilitator and cadre so she can attend waste processing training. Since 2007 equipped with a sewing machine loan, she started to make some crafts made of plastic waste. This housewives admitted her natural talent and her passion with the arts of her skill made her work. As a result, this homemade products had demand from consumers. Product introduction through exhibitions, some orders came from government, schools and companies.
The first mission of Yanti is only to participate in environmental conservation activities. However, with the collaboration of creativity and independence efforts to raise the idea, this project become not just environmental activities. By continuing to involve a community of mostly housewives, Yanti develops plastic recycling skills to become a home-based industry while creating employment opportunities. Initial supporting from Unilever Indonesia is a sewing machine assisting Yanti's business. Now, Yanti has five sewing machines in her workshop, 10 employees, and a community network of Trashion brand recycling activists at a number of points in Jakarta.
Five kilograms of plastic become the starting point of this business. At that time, Yanti had to collect plastic from household waste. The plastic should be sorted first. Only the ones that are still worth the process. But now the society’s awareness of plastic waste has begun to raises because of this Trashion business.
People began to awaken their awareness to collect plastic waste, wash, and sell it as raw material for production. Not only for housewives, trash scavengers are also already concerned with this packaging plastic waste because the price is higher. Packaging plastic waste raw materials are valued at 3,500 rupiah until 5,000 rupiah per kilogram at Trashion workshop.
As Yanti said, the key to staying in this business are well intent and be patient, because to make recycling products it takes a long process to get the best results.
The trash scavengers who before did not care about packaging plastic waste, now got a chance to have new income. Before the packaging plastics are only priced at 300 rupiah per kilogram in the collectors. Trashion afford to pay packaging plastic waste at higher prices that makes the trash scavengers more motivated to collect plastic. Trashion Production continues to increase every year. Every month the demand for goods reaches more than 500 items. Since the beginning of 2010, the giant hyper market company Hypermart ordered 3,000 products as the first stage of its partnership with Trashion. And the orders also come mostly from the seminar events that held in a view city in Indonesia not only Jakarta, Yanti intervened directly in preparing these orders.
To meet the increasingly mounting demand, Yanti is consistent with the initial concept, empowering housewives community and scavengers related to plastic raw materials. For the mass production process, in addition to recruiting housewives, she also recruited the young people that cannot afford to continue their studies until high school, get intensive training from Yanti herself until they become skillful in this work.Yanti divides the portion of each employee's duties. Starting from the washing stage with disinfectant, drying by drying in the sun, cutting (taking pictures), sewing pieces of drawing (panel), making patterns, and finishing. The end result of this production is a variety of products worthy of aesthetic and environmentally-friendly value. The form of a laptop bag, waist bag, shopping bag, make-up bag, lunch-box bag, backpack, sandals, wallet, mobile casing, coin purse, travel bag, umbrella, and others. Yanti also accepts orders for storage containers or other products such as carpets. Price depends on the size and difficulty level of the design and the model.
The Trashion product’s price are varied from 15.000 rupiah for a coin purse, up to 400,000 rupiah for travel bag. Price depends on the size and difficulty level of the design and the model. With production capacity of 800 items per month, Trashion is able to attract the market and contribute a turnover of up to 50 million rupiah per month for Yanti's production workshop. After the production cost Yanti gets a net profit of about 30-50%, this profit not only give benefit for Yanti, but also bring benefit for housewives who participated in the development of Trashion products, and for the development of the environmental program around in the neighborhood. Consumer goods company with environmental awareness, Unilever (Yayasan Unilever Indonesia), once gave Yanti a chance to participate in quality control training, so that Trashion product has high competitiveness, style, and character. Trashion found international recognition as part of the success of Unilever's program. Since then, Trashion has received orders from several countries such as Singapore, Philippines, India, Netherlands, England to USA.
The Trashion labeled business has been running for almost eleven years. Since this business started, Yanti having a lot activities being a speaker in various entrepreneurship training, corporate CSR development, Yanti is also actively conducting socialization for sorting plastic waste into housing and apartments, as well as obtaining adequate raw materials from direct users and providing benefits to housing managers (RT / RW) and apartment management.
Not only empowering the surrounding community, this business also takes part in maintaining land damage due to the plastic waste that can not decompose.Get stories of positive business innovations from around the world delivered right to your inbox.
Heryanti Simarmata, Mrs
You can imagine how much household plastic waste is collected in a month, maybe the number could reach tens of kilograms. In fact, plastic packaging takes a long time to decompose on the ground. Imagine the impact on the environment? Waste that is often considered useless is recycled and processed creatively by Heryanti Simarmata or usually called Yanti. In the beginning Yanti just want to save the environment and combined with her talent in making craft art, since 2007 she made the trash into an attractive fashion product with Trashion label.
The simple work of plastic household waste opens huge opportunities for herself and the environment. Yanti has been increasingly recognized by many communities, companies, local and international, since raising the idea of turning waste into worthy objects with the Trashion label. "At first, this plastic waste recycling product became the first winner of dry waste treatment program of Jakarta Green & Clean in 2008. Since then, Yantis’s product become popular and orders started to come.