In our daily lives, how much food, milk, coffee, or chips do we consume that come in foil packs? In a week? In a month? When we think about it, that’s a whole lot of trash. In our world today, there have been many efforts to go green—encouragement to walk or use bikes to move around the city, reusing paper bags or utilizing “eco bags” for grocery shopping, paperless systems, or favoring paper over plastic. While we all make our own little efforts to help the environment, there is one woman who decided to take it a big step further.
Meet Roxanne Cuacoy, or as we fondly call her, ate Rox.
Ate Rox is our lovely secretary at the Fine Arts department in the school where I teach at. She’s ever so charming, a joy to be around, and an all around lovely person. I learned a while back that ate Rox, beautiful person that she is, has and continues to make an astounding effort to make the world a better place. Sounds cheesy, but let me show you why:
You see, ate Rox makes bags on her spare time. And not just any old bag, she makes them out of empty foil packs. Don’t they look fantastic?
But let’s backtrack a little bit. I asked ate Rox about how and when this whole thing started, and she tells me that this all came about some 3 years ago when she had just moved to a new house. Of course when moving into a new home, you sometimes realize that you might have more stuff than you initially thought. Wanting to reduce her garbage, she thought to make something out of it.
Ate Rox turned to YouTube for tutorials, added a little bit of her own ingenuity, and after a lot of trial and error, she finally developed the method in which she could create her first bag.
“It took me 15 tries before I finally made a bag,” she tells me.
She actually started by using pages from old magazines, but later found that the resulting bag was too heavy. But she soon discovered that she could use foil packaging, and reduced her garbage by a vast amount!
She shares with me that ever since childhood, she’s always been fond of arts and crafts, and even took up fine arts in Davao at some point. When I asked her why she decided to make bags and not some other product, she tells me that she wanted to make something different from the usual crafts that she observed around her.
“I always liked the idea of up-cycling. I wanted to make something unique and beautiful out of trash, that could be used and appreciated by others.”
It was a sentiment that I very much liked hearing!
It’s really amazing to see how something as mundane as the trash we throw away turned into something beautiful and functional. Being a creative person, I personally enjoy seeing the colors and patterns ate Rox creates with her bags. You can tell that she herself has a wonderfully creative mind to think of something like this.
The first bag she created was actually gifted to ma’am Beni Santos, one of our senior faculty members, and it was she who told ate Rox that she could turn it into a business. At first, ate Rox was a little doubtful about the idea. But little did she know that it was indeed something she could do!
Her bags (branded Rox C) feature a weave pattern using the foil wrappers (either using wrappers all from the same product, or similar in color), and wooden handles. Ate Rox uses the same kind of thread I use when I crochet, and matches the colors with the bags.
She’s contemplated using a different kind of handle, but was later set on using the wooden ones she finds in Divisoria. “I like to Filipino look to it!” Her peg for her bags is our traditional Filipino bayong, a bag often made of palm leaves and typically used for buying stuff at the market. I completely agree that her bags definitely emanate the humble Pinoy bayong, but evolved into something more modern and dare I say stylish!
I can’t even begin to tell you how a pile of garbage turns into something so pretty and practical!
You have to appreciate just how much work goes into each back. She’s gotten quite a number of orders (and one from me!), so she’s enlisted the help of a few people.
Of course there’s that concern about the bags having residue from the product it once contained, but not to worry. Ate Rox washes them out and makes sure they’re all clean!
Ate Rox is definitely very passionate about her product and her cause. Just recently, she held a workshop on how to possibly create her bags to help spread the idea of up-cycling. She was met with a few frustrated attendees about how certain aspects of process to create them were difficult, but overall enjoyed it. I guess that goes to show that a lot of the things that matter take hard work and dedication!
At the end of the day, it definitely is true that one man’s trash is another woman’s treasure. And while this isn’t really food for your stomach, we could say that it’s food for the soul.
