Plakkies. Durban, South Africa. Photo TU Delft via Flickr

Fair Trade: fair enough. Bananas, coffee and sugar with the well known label are now a permanent supply in my supermarket. A good development for fair consumers, and luckily new, fresh environmentally and local-friendly businesses initiatives keep on arising. The internet connects consumers, producers and investors.

Second life for car tyres: Plakkies and Ecosandals

Two years ago, a group of Dutch  industrial design students and a shoe designer worked together with ngo Kids Rights. In the slums of Durban, South Africa, they produce trendy flip-flops with a sole made of recycled car tyres: "Plakkies". 70 people from the neighbourhood have  found a stable job in the flip-flop factory. The benefits are donated to the ngo, that supports local development projects for children. A similar project (car tyres are abundant, apparently) is running in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, since 2001 already: Ecosandals. The name is a bit less catchy, the designs are equallly colourful.

 The bittersweet sides of chocolate trade

Flip flops, despite their popularity, do not beat chocolate on the world market. Cocoa stays one of the most globally consumed products, with a dubious trading past and present. Only four days ago, “Real life Willy Wonka” or hedge-fund manager Anthony Ward has bought up so much cocoa that chocolate traders world wide are fearing the prize of chocolate bars. El Castillo del Cacao is one of the small scale counterparts of the global chocolate market: near the small town of Matagalpa, Nicaragua, Dutch entrepreneur and self-proclaimed “chocoholic” Harm van Oudenhoven set up his chocolate castle six years ago. El Castillo buys organic cocoa from local farmers, and produces delicious chocolate bars and rum-filled pralines for the local and international market. Van Oudenhoven's initiative won the “Best Business Idea for development” prize, an award by the Business in Development (BiD) platform, that connects initiatives such as the above mentioned flipflops and chocolate.

Online community for upcoming entrepreneurs and investors

BiD  is an online comnmunity with 34.000 members from all over the world, that connects entrepreneurs with investors and advisors. The idea behind the project (supported by the Dutch ministry of forgein affairs and a lottery) is to boost business initiatives in developing countries. All year round business plan competitions motivate participants to come up with creative ideas. Upcoming events are  Bid Challenge Argentina (deadline: August 16) and Bid Challenge Mozambique (deadline: December 31). The winners of 2009 and 2010 and are the Peruvian Marco Antonio Piñatelli, who harvests moss as a substrate for plants, providing work for poor rural communities, and American Alexander Eaton, who installs  biodigesters to produce biogas in Latin America.

Sustainable flipflops, chocolate and other products sold online, is the internet a start for a fair, sustainable global economy or is this all too marginal compared to polluting, human rights violating multinationals? Who knows similar projects?