💎 Have you ever thought that jewelry we wear could be made from environmental waste?

🇮🇩 A little while ago, I heard about a very interesting project—the Fashion Village Lab in Cigondewah, Indonesia.

🏆 This year, in order to promote regional sustainable development, the Ministry of Economic Affairs is conducting the first Asia-Pacific Social Innovation Cooperation Award. It has received entrants from as many as 13 countries, and ended up with 62 teams in total. The Fashion Village Lab is one of them.

🏭 Indonesia is a garment manufacturing powerhouse. Bandung City accounts for 40% of the national garment output value. Bandung’s Cigondewah area is a distribution center for international brand manufacturers. Five years ago, the Bandung Creative Cities Forum (BCCF) and Dutch researchers established a presence there because the factory’s waste pollution was affecting the quality of life for local workers.

🚸After learning more about it, they combined local community strength to launch the Fashion Village Lab.

♻️The lab’s vision is to create a self-sufficient “circular creative ecosystem”: transforming solid pollutants produced in factories into products such as building blocks and jewelry; collaborating with students in architecture and design-related fields to build stores that showcase production processes, retain land for dyeing plants, develop new materials, and conduct experiments on sustainable textiles.

🌐 The success of the Fashion Village Lab is based on an effective “3C formula”: connecting with local stakeholders (Connect), inviting everyone to collaborate (Collaborate), and finally incorporating businesses and stakeholders to expand innovative business models (Commerce). This formula is based on the field work of the Bandung Creative City Forum in the past ten years. It has successfully connected the stakeholders in production, government, study, research, and society, and has also made Bandung a member of the UNESCO “Creative City” network (UCCN).

🎁 Now that the Fashion Village Laboratory is in its final stages, and the Kawasan Wisata Sandang Cooperative, which is run by local women and youths, is ready to sell the finished products of the circular economy through the lab.

💞 This year, Cigondewah’s team was unanimously recognized by a panel of experts from Japan, Singapore, Australia, Thailand, and India, and was awarded the “Special Jury Prize”. They will come to the Asia Pacific Social Enterprise Summit in May this year to accept the award. Everyone is welcome to come to Kaohsiung to meet these excellent teams and explore new possibilities for regional revitalization.