Eco-Processing Futures: Turning Local Resources into Market-Ready Enterprises in Del Carmen

Inside AGREA's two-day Eco-Processing Futures workshop in Del Carmen, Siargao: coconut by-products, baliw fibre, banana leaves, and textile waste as enterprise.

The eighty percent

Siargao grows coconut on more than half its land area. Roughly 17,971 farmers are registered on the island, and most of them sell copra — the dried coconut meat — and little else. According to the International Labour Organization, more than 80 percent of coconut by-products on Siargao go to waste, while incomes remain below the poverty line.

Shell. Husk. Coir dust. The parts of the nut that the copra trade does not pay for.

That figure is the reason a workshop on eco-processing is not an abstract exercise in business planning. It describes a specific material stream, in a specific place, that is currently being discarded, and a population that is currently poor despite producing it.

From 11 to 12 September 2026, AGREA Foundation held the Para sa Isla workshop titled Eco-Processing Futures: Turning Local Resources into Market-Ready Enterprises at the Women's Center in Del Carmen, Surigao del Norte. People's Organizations and community stakeholders worked on eco-processing, sustainable packaging, branding, digital marketing, upcycling, and circular business models for GEDSI-led enterprises.

The subject of the two days was not whether local materials exist. It was what has to happen between a material and a market.

What "eco-processing" means, and why it is the hard part

Growing something is one skill. Processing it into something that can be stored, transported, labelled, priced, and sold repeatedly is another.

A coconut husk is free. Coco coir, coco peat, coco twine, rope, coir paper, plant hangers, and charcoal briquettes made from that husk are not — and the distance between the two is processing. The same is true of a banana leaf, a baliw frond, or a discarded t-shirt. Each is abundant and nearly worthless in its raw state, and each becomes a product only after someone has decided what to make, how to make it consistently, how to package it, what to call it, and who will buy it.

The workshop's four named material streams each illustrate a different version of that problem.

Coconut by-products

The composition of coconut waste is documented: roughly 35 percent husk, 12 percent shell, with coir dust making up much of the remainder. The uses are well established. Decorticators separate husk into fibre and peat; the fibre becomes twine, rope, geotextiles, and coir paper; the peat becomes a growing medium; the shell becomes handicraft material or, when carbonised, briquettes.

The Department of Trade and Industry has been running trainings on exactly this through its RAPID Growth Project, and the framing used by DTI Leyte's provincial director is worth repeating: "There is an opportunity in every part of the coconut. What we want is for our farmers and cooperatives to recognize that opportunity and learn how to turn it into income."

One participant in an ATI-MIMAROPA training put the shift more plainly. She said that they had believed the coconut husk had no use and was merely waste material — and learned through the training that it could be made into a product with added value and an additional income stream.

That is a change in perception before it is a change in technique. And on an island wasting over 80 percent of its coconut by-products, perception is the binding constraint.

Baliw leaves

Baliw is a Pandanus — a screwpine — and its leaves are the material behind coarse mats, baskets, and slippers in Surigao del Norte. Weaving with baliw is traditional practice, and in Tagana-an, on the mainland across the strait from Siargao, the Binayloay Mamanwa Weavers Association revived the craft in September 2025 after it had gone dormant for a decade. The training was run by DTI through its Negosyo Center, and the weavers organised themselves into a formal association so they could manage projects, secure resources, and market collectively.

That organisational step is the part most craft-revival programmes skip, and it is the part that determines whether a technique survives a single order. A weaver can work alone. A weaving enterprise cannot price, negotiate, deliver on schedule, or absorb a bad batch without an entity that holds the commitments.

Banana leaves

Banana leaves are the most familiar of the four materials and the easiest to undervalue. They wrap suman, bibingka, and puso; they line serving platters for lechon and pancit; they are folded into cones and triangles that hold liquid. They have been used this way for centuries, and the practice never disappeared — it simply stopped being described as packaging.

The technical case for them is not only cultural. Banana leaves are documented as having antibacterial properties that slow spoilage, and a study comparing packaging inserts for oyster mushroom found that the package with a banana leaf insert lasted more than two days longer than alternatives.

For a food enterprise on an island, that is a shelf-life claim with a price attached. It is also a packaging material that grows locally, composts, and carries no extended producer responsibility liability.

Textile waste

The fourth material stream is the one that arrives from outside the island.

The Philippine Textile Research Institute estimates the country generates roughly 267,711 tonnes of textile waste each year, equivalent to 1.6 percent of total municipal solid waste. The drivers identified at the 2025 Philippine Textile Congress include fast fashion imports, the second-hand clothing trade, unregulated offcuts that are landfilled or burned, and consumer preference for novelty over durability.

For Del Carmen, textile waste is not hypothetical. In March 2026, under Project PEARLS' G.R.O.W. program, mothers from ESPOIR School of Life took part in a macramé livelihood training that cut used t-shirts into continuous fabric strips — the municipality's own announcement describing it as upcycling, circular economy, and new income streams in a single activity.

And on an island where tourism brings a steady flow of discarded clothing and linen, the raw material is not scarce. What is scarce is a consistent product line, a buyer, and a price.

The five partners in the room

The workshop's facilitation was shared across organisations with genuinely different capabilities, and the division of labour is instructive.

The SNSU Food Innovation Center is not a generic training venue. Del Carmen hosts the Agri-Fishery Processing and Food Innovation Center at the Surigao del Norte State University–Del Carmen Campus, established in collaboration with DOST Caraga and supported by the municipal government. Its stated function is research and development focused on creating new food products from raw materials available in the region. The university has already worked with a local farm couple turning farm by-products into value-added food and beverages anchored in their coconut heritage. DOST has also released funding to move food prototypes toward larger-scale production, according to reporting on the project.

That is the institutional answer to the "how do you make it consistently" question.

ESPOIR School of Life is a non-profit school in Barangay Lobogon, Del Carmen, providing free education to underprivileged children, with a community development model built around learners and their families. Its presence in the room connects the workshop to a group that has already done textile upcycling — the mothers who cut t-shirts into strips in March — and to the household economies those mothers manage.

Lokal Lab is a Siargao-based grassroots NGO, founded in 2019, whose four pillars are social development, circular economy, sustainability, and culture. Its Lokal Artisans programme connects artisans with designers and introduces pricing strategies intended to ensure they receive fair compensation for their craftsmanship. Its CocoLab programme exists specifically to help coconut industry members add value to coconut waste and diversify income. And its origin story contains a number that reframes the whole workshop: when the founders began sourcing ingredients for a snackbar, they discovered that 97 percent of produce sold on the island was imported, and that buyers and sellers could not connect because there was no marketplace.

That is a market-access diagnosis, arrived at commercially rather than academically. It is also the reason a workshop on branding and digital marketing belongs in the same room as one on processing.

Project PEARLS runs the G.R.O.W. program — Giving Resources and Opportunities to Women — launched in 2019 to address poverty and the lack of job skills and livelihood opportunities, with a significant focus on utilising upcycled materials to create products. It is present in Del Carmen through the ESPOIR training and through a waste-to-fuel facility developed with DENR-Caraga, UNDP, the European Union, AGREA, and Project PEARLS.

iLAJA, the Siargao-based youth-led agricultural NGO, is co-implementer of Para sa Isla alongside AGREA and the Municipal Government of Del Carmen.

Read together, the five cover the chain: a technical centre that can formulate and test a product, an NGO that can connect an artisan to a designer and a fair price, a women's livelihood programme with an upcycling track record, a youth-led local organisation with agricultural reach, and a foundation that convenes and funds the whole thing.

The policy tailwind, stated precisely

Three national instruments are moving in the same direction as this workshop, and it is worth naming them because they convert goodwill into demand.

The Extended Producer Responsibility Act, Republic Act No. 11898, requires large enterprises to recover and divert a growing share of their plastic packaging waste, with targets of 60 percent in 2026, 70 percent in 2027, and 80 percent from 2028 onward. That obligation creates a market for packaging that is not plastic — including plant-fibre and woven alternatives.

The Philippine Tropical Fabrics law, Republic Act No. 9242, requires government agencies to use tropical fabrics — those containing natural fibres produced, spun, woven or knitted and finished in the Philippines — for official uniforms, and the amended implementing rules expand the covered fibres to include abaca, banana, pineapple, silk, and bamboo. A banana leaf is not a fibre in the textile sense, but a banana stem is, and the law creates a standing public-sector buyer for natural-fibre fabric.

DOST–PTRI's Natural Textile Fibre Innovation Hubs — three in the country, including a ₱6 million facility in Benito Soliven, Isabela dedicated to converting banana fibre into high-value textile products — are the processing infrastructure that makes the second instrument usable by rural communities.

Del Carmen's own municipal infrastructure sits alongside these. The municipality has established an Innovation Center to test technologies that extend food shelf life, develop climate-resilient food products, and reduce food waste, and is exploring how coconut residues and other waste can become value-added products. It operates a plastic-to-fuel facility for non-recyclable plastic that would otherwise have to be shipped off the island. It has signed Executive Order No. 05, Series of 2026, institutionalising circular economy principles — including green procurement and material recovery — into local governance.

An enterprise that emerges from this workshop would not be starting from nothing. It would be starting inside a municipal system that has already committed to buying, processing, and recovering materials differently.

The GEDSI question, asked properly

The workshop's title places GEDSI at the centre — "circular business models for GEDSI-led enterprises" — and the term is often used loosely enough to mean very little.

The definition used by Philippine government agencies, drawn from Australia's development programme and adopted in TESDA guidance, is specific: Gender Equality, Disability and Social Inclusion refers to efforts to ensure that people from all backgrounds — including women and gender diverse people, people with a disability, and people facing other forms of marginalisation — can equitably access, use, contribute to, influence and benefit from the design, development and governance of a programme or institution. A GEDSI lens is used to prevent unintended harm, exclusion, and further marginalisation.

Four words carry the weight: influence and governance. Consultation is not inclusion. Being counted among beneficiaries is not inclusion.

For a processing enterprise, that translates into questions with commercial consequences. Who owns the formula — the technologist at the Food Innovation Center, or the women who brought the recipe? When a designer refines a woven pattern, whose name goes on the label? If a member can do one step of the process but not another, is the workflow designed around her capability or around an able-bodied norm? Are older weavers paid for teaching, or is their knowledge treated as a free input? Does the association's leadership rotate?

None of those questions is settled in two days. What the workshop could do is name them as business decisions — which is where they are usually decided, quietly, by whoever happens to be in the room.

What the workshop does and does not establish

Two days is an input, and it should be described as one.

The workshop does not establish that any participant has since produced a market-ready product, registered a brand, secured a buyer, priced a line, or converted a single kilo of husk into income. It does not establish that prototypes were built, that packaging was designed, that a digital storefront exists, or that any enterprise adopted a GEDSI lens in its governance rather than in its vocabulary.

The specific outputs of the two days — attendance, the per-session facilitators, which People's Organizations took part, what was actually produced in the exercises — were not published in the announcement, and this article does not reconstruct them.

It is also worth being honest about a structural limit. A workshop on business models can clarify a pathway. It cannot supply the three things such enterprises most often lack: working capital between orders, a buyer who returns, and a governance structure that survives its founder. Those are supplied by trade, not by training.

What the workshop does establish is that five organisations with genuinely complementary capabilities sat in the same room as the People's Organizations that would have to run the enterprises — in a municipality that has legislated circular economy principles, hosts a DOST-supported food innovation centre, wastes more than 80 percent of its coconut by-products, and discards enough textile waste to make a product line. Those are conditions. They are not results.

What comes next

For the participating organizations, the next steps are specific and testable. Cost one finished product completely — material, labour hours, consumables, packaging, transport — before naming a price. Test one packaging change and measure what it does to shelf life or breakage. Register the association's name and mark. Photograph the product properly, because a digital storefront without a decent photograph is a page nobody buys from. Record who made what, both for attribution and for quality control. Decide in writing how teaching by older members will be compensated.

For the partners, the obligation is different. The Food Innovation Center can formulate; the question is whether it will formulate for a People's Organization with no budget for product development. Lokal Lab can connect an artisan to a designer; the question is whether that connection produces a repeat order. Project PEARLS and ESPOIR have already demonstrated that a training can produce a skill; the question is whether the skill has a buyer nine months later.

For AGREA, iLAJA, and the Municipal Government of Del Carmen, the grant runs to 2028. That is enough time to support an enterprise past its first order — which is the only test that matters.

A note of appreciation

To the Food Innovation Center at SNSU–Del Carmen, ESPOIR School of Life, Lokal Lab, Project PEARLS, and iLAJA for bringing different capabilities into one room instead of five separate trainings. And to the People's Organizations and community members who gave two days to it: the materials were already here. What the workshop was trying to build is the business that makes them worth something.

The husk is free. The product is not. Closing that gap is the work.

To learn more about the Para sa Isla Project and AGREA Foundation's work on circular economy livelihoods in Siargao, explore our official channels. Local government units, People's Organizations, and enterprises interested in the Green LGUs programme can reach out through our contact page.