Made in Melkhoutfontein™ has grown from decades of Dreamcatcher’s practical work with communities to address environmental, social and economic challenges together rather than in isolation.
Its roots reach back to 1999, when Dreamcatcher’s founder established a crafting centre at Soeterus, the care centre for ageing and vulnerable people in Melkhoutfontein. Crafting with Kamamma and Boetie initiatives were also supporting people in other communities to develop skills and opportunities through making.
But another challenge was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
For decades, Melkhoutfontein and its surrounding environment had experienced the consequences of dumped and burned waste. Community engagement and research increasingly revealed how closely waste, environmental degradation, health and wellbeing, limited economic opportunity and people’s everyday lives were connected.
By 2009, an important question had emerged from this work:
Could the waste creating problems in a community be reimagined as a locally available resource — developing skills, informing the design of useful products and crafts, creating enterprise and reducing environmental harm?
Dreamcatcher, through our protracted work in communities knew that answering that question required different forms of knowledge.
In 2010, the Dreamcatcher South Africa Management Board, led by founder Anthea Rossouw, invited Dr Ryan Woodard of the University of Brighton to Melkhoutfontein to collaborate on the community’s waste challenges.
The work included mapping resources in the wider Stilbaai area, the first waste analysis undertaken in Melkhoutfontein and community waste workshops. Organic waste was included — leading to trials of enclosed home composting in Melkhoutfontein and other township communities.
Building on this groundwork, Dreamcatcher undertook further community engagement and research in 2015. People shared their experiences, needs, challenges, knowledge and ideas about how problematic waste might be put to work in responding to challenges within their own community.
Those voices mattered.
Rather than importing a ready-made solution, they helped shape what happened next.
Led at the University of Brighton by Dr Ryan Woodard, and working with Dreamcatcher founder Anthea Rossouw, community knowledge and research informed a collaborative design brief for art and design students. Tutored by Nick Gant, Tanya Dean and Stefano Santilli students explored how locally available materials — including discarded plastics and invasive Acacia cyclops wood, which was destroying local biodiversity — could become products and crafts using accessible, low-cost processes and available materials.
Dreamcatcher, through Anthea’s longstanding engagement with the community, carried people’s expressed needs, challenges, ideas and knowledge into the design process, alongside the area’s distinctive cultural heritage, fauna and flora. Emerging ideas were presented back to Melkhoutfontein representatives by video link for their response and critique.
Potential products emerged. So did an understanding of the tools, machinery and skills required to make them locally.
With support from donors in the USA, Netherlands, Belgium and UK, Dreamcatcher raised funds for equipment. A subsequent successful joint Dreamcatcher–University of Brighton application to the British Council DICE programme enabled the next critical step: practical skills transfer.
Aspiring local enterprises learned about waste, design, enterprise, health and safety, machinery and tool use and maintenance, and making with plastics, textiles and Acacia cyclops.
Their cultural heritage became part of the process too. Visits to the Blombos Archaeology Museum connected participants with an extraordinary ancestral history of creativity in the landscape they call home.
The participating enterprises unanimously chose to affirm that identity through their products. Working with a professional designer who volunteered her expertise in response to the brief, Made in Melkhoutfontein™ was created and subsequently registered as a trademark. Its visual identity draws inspiration from the geometric markings and colours associated with the engraved ochre discovered at nearby Blombos Cave. Making was therefore about more than producing an object. It connected place, provenance, identity, skills and opportunity.
Training continued through 2018 and 2019 with South African trainers. Local Christmas markets tested sales within Melkhoutfontein and the wider Stilbaai community, followed in early 2020 by engagement with international students and leisure visitors. Then COVID-19 changed almost everything.
Lockdowns, restrictions, economic hardship and the loss of available workshop space severely disrupted the work. But they did not end it.
By 2023, a core group of enterprises, who never lost their passion for design and making from the waste in their community, met to kickstart designing and making again, despite limited space. Products reached local visitors, and orders travelled to the Netherlands, Canada, the UK and USA.
And, importantly, new community needs in their local community were flagged up generated new design responses.
A phased development of 550 low-income homes for families created an urgent need for affordable, visible and weather-resistant house numbers. The homes were identical in design and colour and situated close together, making individual houses difficult to identify — a particular health and safety risk when emergency responders needed to locate a resident quickly. With four numbers required for each house, purchasing them in the main resort town of Stilbaai was unaffordable for many households.
At the same time, a lack of accessible early-years numeracy resources presented another challenge.
The makers began experimenting again — this time with difficult-to-recycle discarded plastic bags and film that were blighting the community.
Plastic was cleaned, and to design and test for resilience, as those made before needed to upgrade their initial degns to make numbers – they layered, pressed and layered using mosaic cuttings from plastic bags, to strengthen the mosaic sheets and to produce sets of numeracy resources for children, with the goal to make it available to schools, as they can be used again and again, year on year.
Designs were refined for colour, visibility, strength and weather resilience. And they ran a market test of the refined designs, by offering the numbers up for sale in 2023 at Christmas market. By January 2025, the first house numbers were being trialed locally, with another set tested outdoors at the UK home of an international visitor.
By June 2026, feedback from the impact-testing locations showed the numbers continuing to perform their intended purpose. Further orders followed, with the group of 4 design for impact ladies, being recognized in the community for their design and making skills.
Problematic plastic waste had become part of a design response working on multiple levels: health and safety, education, accessibility and affordability, environmental regeneration, skills development and a replicable circular pathway towards local entrepreneurial opportunity.
One locally developed design response can therefore serve two practical purposes: helping identify homes for residents and emergency responders, while supporting children’s numeracy learning.
One problematic waste stream. Multiple locally relevant possibilities to use the same design technique to produce a range of crafts and products.
For Dreamcatcher and their inspiring plastic waste-product design Kamammas (community mothers), finding another use for waste is not enough. Circularity must survive a much harder test. And is flagged up, as it did in the past when Dreamcatcher broke the mould of exclusionary tourism business practice, to develop its groundbreaking Homestays and CookUp with Kamamma township tourism services in 1999. Could their plastic designs deliver the same result?
Can it endure environmentally, socially and economically?
Can people participate in developing the solution? Can skills and knowledge remain locally? Can accessible technology be used and maintained? Does the product answer a genuine need? Can it create enterprise and income? Does it reduce environmental harm? Can it adapt when circumstances change? And, critically, does it continue?
Today Made in Melkhoutfontein™ has become a practical environment in which those questions are continually tested, learned from and refined. You can explore the project through the gallery below (click on the thumbnails to enter carousel mode
Waste reduction connects with environmental recovery. Design connects with local resources and needs. Skills connect with enterprise. Making connects with wellbeing. Cultural identity connects with contemporary products. Community knowledge connects with specialist knowledge. This is what sustainable circularity means in practice to Dreamcatcher South Africa:
Circularity is not enough simply because a material has been reused. For circularity to create lasting change, it must itself be sustainable — environmentally, socially and economically. Based on our research, community-led development and social impact outcomes, we believe people are more likely to sustain what they have helped to create.
Our collaborative work continues.
