A: When Farai’s had his creative way with it!
Farai is a member of the Mother City Craft Collective, a collective of traffic-light crafters who you can see selling their wares as you drive through the streets of Cape Town. This group of Zimbabwean crafters have joined forces to expand their market and create an alternative outlet for their crafts, an online shop. This has brought a new set of challenges for these artists, because the traditional wire & bead and wirework crafts that they produce are pretty heavy, which results in very high postage costs.
To reduce the price of postage (and consequently the carbon footprint of the piece) Farai has come up with an interesting solution. He’s using recycled materials that are a lot lighter than the materials that he usually works with.
These recycled Coke can animals and more are available from the Mother City Craft Collective’s recycled range, and as you’ll see, both the cost of the products and the postage costs are considerably less than the traditional. While buying crafts from this store makes a huge difference in the lives of these traffic-light crafters, by choosing from the recycled range you will be making a huge difference to the environment too.
So while necessity is the mother of invention, isn’t it great when it also leads to recycling, reusing and a greener way of doing things?