This week at the cashmere factory

This week at the cashmere factory in Kathmandu....

1. We have put in a new rubbish sorting system.

We have put extra bins everywhere, and some big bins near the entrance ready for collection.

The tiny bits of waste cashmere that were thrown away before, are now being collected, and put inside nice cushion covers. (The result is cushions containing about $150 worth of cashmere by weight!). The are for workers who mostly sit down while doing there work and for decoration.

The paper and card will be sold to a recycling company for 2 rupees per kilo.

The hard plastic and metal will be collected by someone who then sells it.

The soft plastic - which there is not much will go to the city dump (not to the Bagmati river, where a lot of rubbish collectors dump their rubbish .. grrrr!)

2. A shiney new noticeboard is clear to see in the middle of the factory
We found from our questionnaire of the staff that they would like to know more about what is going on in the factory, and indeed to work closer with the management. So a noticeboard is a simple solution.

The first things to go on the noticeboard are:
a. News about the new rubbish sorting
b. Information about training options
c. Information about new monthly meetings between different departments and factory management
d. News of a staff picnic on the 20th December - and the planned activites
e. The factory mission (in many Chinese factorys I saw big slogans on the walls). I asked for these to be translated and found out they said things like "Work hard today, and you will have a job tomorrow"). I thought this was a bit threatening - especially in 6ft high red letters! But the idea of having reminders in the factory about the mission for quality and timeliness are good.


3. Quality Control Book
Every piece of cashmere knitwear that is made is thoroughly checked (when i have a good internet connection, i will put some videos of this online).

Now, records of every item are being kept, so at the end of every day it can be reviewed and system inprovements can be made.

Also at the end of every week, statistics from the book can be collected, and displayed on the noticeboard in order to (hopefully) show everyone the continual improvement.

Thats all for now. Today Caroline is making the voiceover on a video about the situation of women in western Nepal - which is shocking and tragic (and will be uploaded once we have decent internet connections) - Doctors and money required .. if anyone out there wants to help contact us, and we will put you in touch with the right people .