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Its 11 years since I was in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. Things have changed dramatically since then. The city is more developed and a generation of new buildings is replacing many of the dilapidated French colonial architecture and the more recent bullet scarred soviet-style concrete blocks.

On the way in to town from the airport, the old firing range where you could play with RPGs and AK47s has gone. As the car headed into thickening traffic I noted the number of 'blacked out' Rangerovers and other luxury brands on the road. Mr T the driver told me there are now two Rolls Royces on the road in the city. In 2000 the most luxurious vehicles were the land cruisers of government officials and NGOs.

I meet Debbie Watkins of Funky Junk in one of the new breed of boutique hotels that has opened here to cater for the increasing numbers of tourists. She explains that after meeting her husband here in Cambodia, they set up a travel agency as a social enterprise. It was when they led tours around the country that they noticed the blight of plastic bags scattered around.

Later as we drive to Kep on the coast, to see the small Funky Junk production workshop, the bags are much in evidence by the side of the road.

Debbie looked into recycling options and found that there are none and as the country develops, plastic bags are handed out with every purchase. Debbie tells me a plastic bag here is used for an average of 20 minutes - and estimates on how long they will take to degrade in the environment vary from 100 to 500 years.

In places like Cambodia rubbish pickers already work on the dumps, collecting tin cans, and glass and plastic bottles that have a value when sold on for recycling. Plastic bags are scattered around the landscape because they have no such value. So the challenge for Debbie was to figure out a use for them that made them worth picking up.

Furthermore, it had to be something that didn't require any additional investment or energy.

When she found that the bags could be made into a yarn for crochet Debbie began to experiment. It takes a lot of time to make the shopping bags, waste paper baskets, cushions and purses by hand. So the products needed to be sold at a premium to provide enough value all the way through the chain.

It was vital that the final products were desirable enough in their own right to command decent prices. So Funky Junk was born, the bold colours come from the plastic bags themselves and the designs are modern and, well, funky.

Luckily there is a market locally for this kind of thing, mostly made up of ex-pats and tourists. But to increase the production to other centres and really clean up across the country, and maybe even spread the idea to other countries, Funky Junk needs export markets and Debbie wants to see the products in the fashionable boutiques of the developed world.