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Greening the Craft Crop:
Recycling and Sustainability in the World Craft Market
By Transparency Center

Recycling materials such as glass, metal and paper has long been a fact of life in many regions and countries of the world—often out of necessity. As artisans and craft producers gain access to more “modern” processes and synthetic materials, they often stop using recycled materials. However, in the United States and Europe, recycled materials are not necessarily considered to be inferior. In fact, for some markets, they may be more desirable and enhance the value of the product.

Many consumers are very interested in protecting the environment and contributing to the sustainability of ecosystems around the world. These consumers want to buy goods that minimize the consumption of raw materials and are produced in ways that help forests, wildlife and endangered species, and water and air quality. Goods made with recycled or “environmentally-friendly” materials and processes are referred to as “green” products and are often in great demand.

The mini-case studies below provide examples of how recycled materials have been used in craft production around the world. Today’s artisans and producers may want to creatively think about how they currently use or can increase the use of recycled materials in their products. This allows artisans to capitalize on the “green” market in industrialized countries, reduce costs and improve the sustainability of their community.

Copper: Reused from Mexico to Nepal
In central Mexico, the Purepecha people used to find copper deposits on the land. However, over the course of 600 years and the draining of its resources through Spanish colonization, most of the area’s copper deposits have become depleted. For years, centuries before such thinking came to most industrialized nations, the Purepecha have created their beautiful copper vessels from recycled copper.

The situation is similar in the mountainous nation of Nepal. There the Biswakarma people, members of a centuries-old blacksmith caste, work with copper daily in their mountain forges. Most of the metal they use is recycled as well, because natural resources and the means to extract them are in short supply.

The Tohono O’Odham Indians: Making the Old New Again
In southern Arizona, a part of the United States known as the Sonoran desert, there is little but dirt, dust and cacti. In a truly creative effort, members of the Tohono O’Odham tribe create beautiful baskets from bent wire. They get the wire from a variety of local sources—most often it is used baling wire. An excellent example of recycling from necessity, these baskets are beautiful and traditional art created from the materials at hand.

Turning Hair into Silver: Modern African Alchemists
Centuries ago, indigenous peoples in Kenya commonly created bracelets using the hair of the elephant tail. However, in recent years the hunting of elephants has been outlawed, and local craftspeople have worked to preserve their traditional craft forms and beliefs by recreating these bracelets in silver, thus continuing their valuable heritage while also safeguarding the beautiful animals that inspired it.

Binga Baskets: Creating Art from Pulled Weeds
The Tonga people in Zimbabwe live in the Binga region, where they have practiced a beautiful, sustainable craft tradition for untold centuries. The Tonga people are rice farmers, but each year when the time comes to plant rice, many reeds have grown up in the paddies which must be cleared away. Instead of throwing the reeds out, the Tonga women learned to weave them into beautiful baskets—a tradition of sustainable use of what some might consider worthless weeds.

Making Baskets from Dropped Pine Needles
In a similar use of natural materials, a group of women in northern Nicaragua gathers pine needles that have dropped to the ground. Each woman then meticulously shapes the needles into a coil, adding more as she stitches the coils together, ultimately weaving thousands of pine needles into a single basket. The final product, which is both beautiful and useful, is an example of invention born out of ingenuity, imagination and resourcefulness.

Cocobolo Wood: Resource for Today and Tomorrow
Much controversy has recently surrounded the use of the tropical wood known as cocobolo. However, some artisans who use it are aware of its precious nature, and the need to preserve these beautiful trees for the future. One Costa Rican artisan makes beautiful hand-carved turtles from this wood and buys 100 cocobolo trees each year. However, of those 100 trees, he cuts down only 1. The other 99 he leaves standing to ensure that this resource will be a vibrant and available material in the future.

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