Our decorative large baskets are made from recycled plastic bags. They are great to keep your read or unread mail, for paper waste on your desk, or for knick-knacks.

These baskets, and all of our recycled plastic-bag products, represent an effort by Mayan Hands weavers to keep their villages clean from plastic waste. Guatemala has a big problem with trash, so working with used plastic bags has been a vehicle for environmental education.

People ask us how these products are made. The weavers collect used plastic bags, wash and clean them, cut them into strips and weave them on their back-strap looms. On these products, cotton yarns are used for the warp (to make the cloth more stable) and the strips of plastic for the weft. Plastic bags in Guatemala come in all the colors of the rainbow, so the women weave them combining colors, according to the bags they find.