Outsmart Waste by Tom Szaky

Author:Tom Szaky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2014-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

Leave Your Assumptions at the Door

The best way to wrap your head around upcycling is to stop looking at objects as waste. Take a tip from nature and look at your “waste” as a valuable material—an output whose initial intention doesn’t need to determine its current purpose. Look at what that object is but try to ignore what it was. In fact, try to pretend that you don’t even know what it was made for in the first place.

For example, from the point of view of upcycling, a chip bag is not food packaging; it’s a flexible plastic film. It is a waterproof, colorful, thin, and easy-to-tear material with very high tensile strength. The more obvious applications for such a material are weaving and sewing, but the possibilities are endless.

Take another example: a bicycle chain. If you didn’t know it was made as a key component of a bicycle, you would be freed to see it without that lens—as a heavy-duty metal chain that connects to itself and can easily be made into smaller sections. Jewelry, pots, clocks, and a host of other upcycled objects only begin to scratch the surface of the once-a-bicycle-chain’s uses.

Or how about a vinyl record? If you didn’t know that these objects were made to play music (which may be the case with many younger people), you’d just see a black plastic disc about the size of a Frisbee. If you did some experimenting, you’d find that it can be molded after applying a little heat with a hair dryer. What once might have showered bedrooms and dance clubs with music can now be easily formed into a bowl, a plate, or a clock. This list goes on and on and is really limited only by our imagination.

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