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Your faithful writer,
Dr. Daniel Smith

How to turn water bottles into brooms

In a small warehouse in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Phen, a new business is doing its part to fight plastic pollution.

Employees spend their days cutting up used plastic water bottles, turning the plastic strips into bristles for brooms.

Entrepreneur Has Kea, who started the business to help reduce plastic pollution in his city, wants more people to imitate his business model:

Kea’s business is an example of upcycling, a simple idea with a fascinating history — and a promising future.

What is Upcycling?

Upcycling is a simple concept: taking used materials (like plastic bottles or wrapping) and creating something with greater value than the original product.

The term was coined to introduce a more positive and productive version of recycling. Upcycling is contrasted to downcycling, which refers to the use of waste products that are re-used to create something of lesser value than the original product.

The idea was fully introduced in the 1999 book Upcycling and the 2002 book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.

The authors of the second book argue that the industrial production of goods uses a cradle-to-grave model, where plastic and other waste ultimately ends up in the grave, i.e. in a landfill (at best) or polluting the environment (at worst).

They propose a cradle-to-cradle model that mimics the natural world, with resources being reused again and again to get the most value out of them.

Upcycling: Creativity and Community

If you look online, you’ll find that many environmentally-minded people are trying to incorporate upcycling into their day-to-day lives.

The R/Upcycling community on Reddit has over 191,000 members. You can find some cool examples of upcycling on that page, with contributors showing how they’ve creatively reused things that might otherwise have been thrown out:

There are some remarkable examples of communities using upcycling in extraordinarily creative ways.

In Paraguay, there is a musical ensemble called the Recycled Orchestra of Caterua that only uses instruments created from scrap materials found in a landfill near the capital city of Asunción.

The children’s orchestra, which was founded in 2002, has performed around the world with Stevie Wonder and Metallica.

Favio Chavez, who directed the orchestra, said that:

LEARN MORE:

The 2015 documentary Landfill Harmonic is available to Amazon Prime viewers (or on YouTube for a few dollars).

If you want to learn more about how you can start upcycling things in your own life (or if you're just curious about how people are creatively upcycling things they have), there are a few good articles to start off with:

• Good Housekeeping: 65 Useful and Easy Upcycling Ideas for Every Skill Level 

• My Green Mattress: What is Upcycling: 73 Ways to Repurpose Items

• HGTV: 55 New Ways to Upcycle Your Old Stuff

ART OF THE DAY

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Yours,
Dan