BEA Ang has achieved a lot at a young age.

Only in her twenties, Bea is a franchise holder of a popular clothing brand, a designer, and community organizer. She is at the prime of her career and the epitome of the now emerging young entrepreneur sector in the City of San Fernando.

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But unlike young entrepreneurs of her generation, Bea is well entrenched in community issues and has been active in many advocacies. Her well pedigreed life, having descended from a family of old-rich businessmen, had never been a hindrance in her pursuit of the “common tao” advocacies.

Recently, Bea embraced a growing call among businessmen to practice “responsible entrepreneurship,” a call that revolves around the difficult task of practicing eco-friendly management, production, and distribution of products and goods. Among the issues being raised in the advocacy is eradicating the use of plastic bags in favor of the more eco-friendly and practical cloth bags.

Utilizing here vast network and a pinch of ingenuity, Bea not just advocates the use of cloth bags; she also personally takes that task of making them for distribution to friends, relatives and anyone willing to help protect the environment.

“Plastic bags would take hundreds of years before they would disintegrate. Burning plastic harms the atmosphere and burying could also poison the soil and ground water with the chemicals that would come out of the plastic,” she said.

For her bags, Bea uses old jeans, floor sacks and even leftover upholstery cloth. However, the real challenge, according to her, is coming out with fashionable designs so that the bags would attract the interest of consumers. She said that fashionable designs and patterns of cloth bags are accessible via the Internet through the google website.

“The challenge is to make them presentable so that people will use them more often. The designing part is easy but adding a creative twist is a bit tricky,” Ang said, stressing that matching colors and textures of cloths can create even cloth bags that are worthy of commercialization. Cloth bags can be potential livelihood projects and would only entail little expenses in production, according to Ang.

She is also calling on her fellow entrepreneurs to embrace eco-awareness and minimize the harmful effects of commercial activity on the environment.

“The first step is to recognize the problem and help in solving it,” Bea said.