Upcycling
[1]The terms upcycling and downcycling were first used in print in an article in SalvoNEWS by Thornton Kay quoting Reiner Pilz and published in 1994.
He despairs of the German situation and recalls the supply of a large quantity of reclaimed woodblock from an English supplier for a contract in Nuremberg, while just down the road a load of similar block was scrapped.
It was a pinky looking aggregate with pieces of handmade brick, old tiles, and discernible parts of useful old items mixed with crushed concrete.
This is a significant step towards regenerative design culture where the end products are cleaner, healthier, and usually have a better value than the material inputs.
But upcycling is now taking off in other countries, reflecting an increased interest in eco-friendly products, particularly ones that are priced at an affordable level and proving profitable for the manufacturers.
"If upcycling is going to become mainstream, then the corporate world needs to see that it can be profitable," said Albe Zakes, spokesman of U.S. company TerraCycle which specializes in finding new uses for discarded packaging.
"Reform" involves physically altering the item, either by dismantling it, combining it with other materials, or using different techniques to change its form.
Pablo Picasso's Bull's Head (1942), a sculpture made from a discarded bicycle saddle and handlebars, is the Spanish painter's sly nod to the Dadaists.
[11] Throughout the mid-century, the artist Joseph Cornell fabricated collages and boxed assemblage works from old books, found objects and ephemera.
Robert Rauschenberg collected trash and disused objects, first in Morocco and later on the streets of New York, to incorporate into his art works.
Hazoumé has said of these works, "I send back to the West that which belongs to them, that is to say, the refuse of consumer society that invades us every day.
In Vorwarts (Go Forward) (pictured), Wassmann uses four simple objects to depict a vision of modern man on the precarious eave of the 20th century: an early optometry chart as background, a clock spring as eye, a 19th-century Chinese bone opium spoon from the Australian gold fields as nose and an upper set of dentures found on an Australian beach as mouth.
In consumer electronics, the process of re-manufacturing or refurbishment of second-hand products can be seen as upcycling because of the reduced energy and material consumption in contrast to new manufacturing.
[17] Designers have begun to use both industrial textile waste and existing clothing like as the base material for creating new fashions.
[27][28] The lawsuit alleged that Shiver + Duke's use of the buttons created customer confusion and was a materially different use from the original intended use.
[29] Louis Vuitton argued that the modified products failed to meet their quality standards and consumers would likely mistakenly believe that the items originated from the luxury brand.
[31] To live a sustainable life, clothing options opposite to the "throw away" attitude encouraged by fast fashion are needed.
Engineers have found a way to break the food down into a reusable bio-fuel by pressure cooking it and then they are able to make methane out of the remains which can be used to produce electricity and heat.
One relevant book published by Community Museum Project in Hong Kong in 2010, was the first experiment on upcycling systems design.
Spanning across material collecting, upcycling design, local production and public dissemination, it provides proposals towards a sustainable system that will cast impact on our strategies of waste handling and energy saving.
[44] In order to solve this problem, the employment of modern technologies and processes to reuse the waste plastic as a cheap substrate is under research.
The goal is to bring this material from the waste stream back into the mainstream by developing processes, which will create an economic demand for them.
One approach in the field involves the conversion of waste plastics (like LDPE, PET, and HDPE) into paramagnetic, conducting microspheres[45] or into carbon nano-materials by applying high temperatures and chemical vapor deposition.
[46] On a molecular level, the treatment of polymers like polypropylene or thermoplastics with electron beams (doses around 150 kGy) can increase material properties like bending strength and elasticity and provides an eco-friendly and sustainable way to upcycle them.
[45][47] Active research is being carried out for the biotransformation upcycling of plastic waste (e.g., polyethylene terephthalate and polyurethane) into PHA bioplastic using bacteria.
[49] Similar to the aforementioned approach is the combination of nano-materials like carbon nanotubes with powdered orange peel as a composite material.
