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PATH: HelpWeb Home ->EnviroSTART Home -> Be Sustainable -> Rejected Material -> Upcycling Examples
Upcycling
Definition - Upcycling: "Upcycling, also known as creative reuse, is the process of transforming by-products, waste materials, useless, or unwanted products into new materials or products perceived to be of greater quality, such as artistic, practical, or environmental value."
Below are some projects that have already been made by Project Reject...and me. Ranked in order of usefulness/practicality/how much items it saves from landfill, and also personal preference
We hope this gallery gives you ideas on how to re-use typically trashed material in innovative ways
When the pandemic started, I needed to spend a lot more time at home, and thus needed a better desk. Instead of buying a desk, we bought some planks and decided to build our own desk. It was also a reason to use up some old wooden planks/pieces we had lying around, which we used for shelves and table legs. My dad and I took just a few days to build it in the summer of 2020. It's about fifty-fifty new material and old planks
Before planting in our backyard when we moved to our new house, we decided to plant smaller-scale on our deck. We had some leftover floorboards, and it was quite easy to saw them to the right dimensions, and nail them together in a box-shape. The foam on the underside of the floorboards was a cherry on top, as it made the planter boxes watertight, to prevent excess water leakage, one of the worst things you can have in certain types of plant pots.
This one didn't take much time, but we used metal rods leftover from our old trampoline, and stuck them in the ground around the plants, which would keep them upright. Then we wrapped leftover jute fabric around the metal stakes to protect them from the cold of winter. One of our perennial plants died, a strawberry plant, but the other, a haskap berry plant, survived.
This was quite easy. We wanted to give a lamp additional height, and we had an old broken hat-stand/coat rack left in the garage of our house when we moved in, and all we had to do was saw off the top of the hat-stand, then nail the lamp to the stand, and viola, a standing lamp with another 3 feet of height.
(Wait, did he say nail the lamp?) Yeah, I did, and don't worry, the lamp had very minimal circuitry, and we only nailed through the casing. It was totally safe. But DO NOT try stuff like this at home without adult supervision)
This was a weird one, but kind of cool. To make a desk lamp more compatible with, say, a computer, we used an old device's USB cable, reorganized the wiring of the desk lamp, and boom! USB powered lamp.
Though now, we have it set up with a USB-plug adapter anyways, so..
This was a particularly ingenious feat of upcycling, made by my mother, who used old moving boxes to make me a dresser-stand, (when I moved into my room in our new house for the first time), and it actually looked a lot like a wooden dresser, and worked almost as well. Except for sliding out the drawer, which I got used to.
Well, you're probably asking - why not use scrap wood? Well, we ran out, the desk used up it all. Incidentally, on the topic, in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, there were famously recycled-cardboard beds in the Olympic Village, (which were somehow much stronger than their wooden counterparts) to cut down on carbon emissions and resource usage. The beds themselves would be recycled later.
This is an original invention my dad came up with - the specific design, I mean - and it's an ergonomic mousepad and keyboard platform, made out of 100% scrap items - fabric from old denim shorts, stuffing made from more old fabric, as well as some scrap wood for the platforms.
Foldable at its ends
My mom made this from the rest of the jute fabric, and some cardboard, skewers, and canvas fabric. It looks pretty cool!
Amazing way to upcycle old fabric, my mom's made quite a few of these.
This was a really ingenious one - my sister got a pottery wheel for her birthday present, but the problem was, the platform was a bit small. So my dad and I used some scrap material to make a bigger, better, and faster pottery wheel - the mainframe was made out of scrap wood, we used a spare motor and wires for the rotation, and a spare (lid?) for the rotating platform. Guess what! It worked amazingly well and still does
My sister made this by sewing together two pieces of leftover fabric and an old zipper. Looks like a new store-bought pencilcase!
I made this huge two and a half foot long model ship when I was in fifth grade, a steamboat, for a school project out of a recycled cardboard poster display - incidentally from another school project, the Heritage Fair event. I then reused that same model ship and added some features, like removing the steamboat and adding masts for an old fashioned ship, for another school project.
When my sister and I began virtual school, we put webcams on top of old cheap telescope tripods we had lying around, so we could be a further distance from our screens.
Simply transplanting the lower half of an office chair with a broken seat to the seat of an office chair with worn out legs.
We have this tradition of "camping" outside in a tent mounted on our deck, and watching a movie on a projector screen. To hold up the projector screen, we used the metal rods from an old trampoline, and some other pieces of scrap metal. We used nails and a set of stick-on hooks to hold up the projector screen-cloth. (which we also could have made ourselves, but we didn't have enough white fabric, so we bought it)
Very simple device that took maybe 10 minutes to build. We took the ladder of an old bed, and put 4 holes in it to slot the roller wheels
Actually, this has soil too. But this is pretty cool too. First put some growing seeds in a paper tissue soaked with water (the tissue holds in water - prevents evaporation). Then take two plastic containers - fill one with water and drill a hole in the lid, and take the other, drill a hole in the bottom. Take the one with a hole in the bottom right on top of the other, make sure the two holes align. Put the tissue in the top container, pulling it through the hole so it can absorb water by a sort of osmosis-like action, wicking. Then fill the top container about halfway with soil, bury the tissue completely a few centimetres. Not a lot of soil, just a bit.
You can also get some of that nitrogen nutrient mix and do your own hydroponics (without soil)