NORTH MIAMI, Fla. – This crisis in Haiti grows more dire by the day. Gang violence and political uncertainty have engulfed the island nation, and Haiti has also become overwhelmed with garbage.
Every day, enormous amounts of street litter and trash continue to spew into waterways and eventually the Caribbean Sea. Environmental organizations like 4Ocean have been doing what they can to stem the flow with daily operations that remove tens of thousands of pounds of plastic per month from Haiti’s coastlines.
But in the highly populated urban areas, a homegrown mission is also trying to tackle Haiti’s trash trouble with style.
Craft Change Haiti employs residents in Terrier Rouge to collect plastic waste from the streets, which is then repurposed and transformed into everything from totes to aprons by an artisanal sorority of 20 local women. They’ve been at it since 2011.
“We have two missions, one is to create jobs for women so they can be independent…and then the second mission is actually to clean the environment,” explained Craft Change Executive Director Juanita Alcena. “100% of the money goes to pay the ladies in Haiti.”
Alcena is a fashion professor at Westchester Community College in New York and a mentor at Florida International University’s Ratcliffe Art and Design Incubator, located on its Biscayne Bay campus in North Miami. She has served as the Executive Director for Craft Change for the past four years and leads the team of artisans by designing patterns for their creations.
“I was born in Haiti, moved to New York as a teenager,” Alcena explained. “Fashion has always been my passion.”
For Craft Change, the fabric of choice is plastic water pouches, which have become a source of clean water for hundreds of thousands of Haitians since the earthquake in 2010.
While the pouches have made access to clean drinking water more accessible, the discarded plastic waste from the pouches also contribute to Haiti’s growing trash problem.
“People drink water (from) the pouch and then they throw them on the street,” Alcena said. “There is absolutely no sanitation in Haiti so whatever people have in there, they just throw it in the street.”
Once the pouches are collected, the group opens and sanitizes them to prepare them for their new lives as fashion accessories.
“And then after that is a whole process, we have to iron them together, connect, and then we make big, really big pieces out of them,” Alcena explained.
The work not only empowers women, but also reduces the over 170 trillion plastic particles that are polluting our ocean.
“Even though it’s in Haiti, but we live in one Earth,” Alcena said. “It’s not just a Haitian issue, it’s everyone’s issue.”
In fact, a study published Wednesday found that the world creates 57 million tons of plastic pollution each year, with more than two-thirds of it coming from the Global South.
The Don’t Trash Our Treasure team saw it first-hand when we recently visited Sands Key. The tiny island in Biscayne National Park was covered in trash washed up from around the world, driven by the power of the ocean’s currents.
“We have a massive global marine trash problem,” explained environmental activist Andrew Otazo. “You find stuff from Cuba, from the Dominican Republic, from Haiti, from Mexico from all over the world here…and you’ve got the Gulf Stream ripping through and it just drops all this stuff off.”
Alcena believes that not only can fashion be a part of the solution, but it can also drive the conversation on plastic pollution.
“It’s like, where do you get that? What are you wearing? And you can go to the conversation about, believe it or not, this is a plastic bottle,” she said. “My goal is to be kind of like all over the world, and try to empower a woman to not only be independent but also through their work, we can help the environment by recycling and upcycling materials.”
Alcena hopes that the next step would be to open a fashion school in Haiti to further grow and expand on the Craft Change mission.
“There’s a lot of talent in Haiti, the only problem we [is that] opportunities are not there,” Alcena said.
Copyright 2024 by WPLG Local10.com – All rights reserved.
