Serving as an essential advertising tool for everything from cosmetics to cinema, billboards are a part of any urban landscape. Apart from publicity, they make for a very useful housing material for slum dwellers. Used to cover the slum roofs, especially during the monsoons. These impermeable sheets help protect from harsh weather conditions. Billboards are one of the most produced industrial wastes with the shortest span of use. Billboards are very harmful for the environment, especially when disposed into landfills, where they take several years to decompose while releasing toxic waste that mixes with the soil and ground water.
At SPEED Trust, they realised another innovative way to re-use these large vinyl sheets. They started making them into utility products such as bags, totes, wallets and aprons. The inspiration came from another similar intervention by a Swiss company Freitag, who has been making bags and similar products from used truck tarpaulin sheets. SPEED Trust gets these used or rejected billbord sheets from several salvage or scrap shops in the city, where they have been sold by either rag-pickers or companies who do not need them anymore.
Currently, there are about 7 women, who have been trained in sewing by the trust between 2001-04. Each of these women were given a sewing machine to support their skill and carry on sewing. Today all of these women work at the SPEED Trust production center. The Trust also provides child day-care for small children of these women and the older ones are sent to school.
Dhanam is one of the seven women tailors who received the sewing training at the center. She and her younger siblings lived with their grandmother in a very poor condition. In 2004, when Dhanam was 15 years old, she dropped-out of school and was referred to the SPEED sewing center for some vocational training. In 2009 when SPEED Trust started the production center, Dhanam was one of the first employees to join. Now a mother of two, she comes to the workshop everyday and has been earning a consistant income to support herself and her family. Her children go to school and the fee support is provided by the Trust.
