Ayvalık adds new meaning to recycling

American academic Tara Hopkins, 52, uses packaging from ready-made soup, chips, ice cream or waffles, usually considered trash, as the raw material for bags that can be seen in shop windows of famous stores. Hopkins settled in the Ayvalık district of Balıkesir two years ago after visiting on a holiday, having previously worked as a coordinator for social support projects of Sabancı University. She bought a cafŽ in the Hayrettin Paşa district to turn into a workshop and started instructing 80 housewives in the art of making bags, and money, from trash.

Hopkins said the project holds three themes: the environment, woman and preventing poverty. Research for her project led her to Mexico where in prisons packaging material is recycled to be made into bags.

"I went to Mexico and learned how to make bags from the prisoners. What I had learned there, I started to teach to women of Ayvalık," Hopkins said, adding they have four different models of bags at the moment, with four more to come. The manufacturing of one bag takes 12 hours and they are priced from YTL 20 to 40 as indicated by Hopkins.

A housewife makes at least YTL 400 from the making bags and their products are sold at well-known chain stores in Turkey, Hopkins said.