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 value or environmental value.

Description

Upcycling is the opposite of downcycling, which is the other part of the recycling process. Downcycling involves converting materials and products into new materials, sometimes of lesser quality. Most recycling involves converting or extracting useful materials from a product and creating a different product or material.
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.
Upsizing was the title of the German edition of a book about upcycling, first published in English in 1998 by Gunter Pauli and given the revised title of Upcycling in 1999. The German edition was adapted to the German language and culture by Johannes F. Hartkemeyer, then Director of the Volkshochschule in Osnabrück. The concept was later incorporated by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their 2002 book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. They state that the goal of upcycling is to prevent wasting potentially useful materials by making use of existing ones. This reduces the consumption of new raw materials when creating new products. Reducing the use of new raw materials can result in a reduction of energy usage, air pollution, water pollution and even greenhouse gas emissions.
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. For example, during the recycling process of plastics other than those used to create bottles, many different types of plastics are mixed, resulting in a hybrid. This hybrid is used in the manufacturing of plastic lumber applications. However, unlike the engineered polymer ABS which hold properties of several plastics well, recycled plastics suffer phase-separation that causes structural weakness in the final product.
In 2009, Belinda Smith from Reuters wrote that upcycling had increased in the rich countries but observed that upcycling was a necessity in poorer ones:

Supporters of the environmentally friendly practice of upcycling say people in developing countries have effectively been upcycling for years, using old packaging and clothing in new ways, although more out of need than for the environment. 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. A growing number of companies are focusing on upcycling although the trend is still in its infancy with industry-wide figures yet to be produced.

Upcycling has shown significant growth across the United States and the World. For example, the number of products on Etsy, Pinterest or Upcycle Studio tagged with the word "upcycled" increased from about 7,900 in January 2010 to nearly 30,000 a year later., that number stood at 263,685.
Material downcycling occurs when it is either not possible or uneconomic to restore materials to their original quality, for example, when wrought aluminium alloys are melted to produce lower-grade casting alloys. Material upcycling, in the thermodynamic sense, is only possible if even more energy is added to upgrade the material quality. Two guiding questions to ask when assessing recovering for waste materials or products are: How much energy is required to restore the recovered material back to the desired material or product?, and, How does this quantity compare with obtaining the desired material or product from virgin or primary sources? In some cases, little energy is required to reuse a discarded product, for example, secondhand clothing. In other cases, the energy required to recover the materials is more than the energy required to process virgin material.

Recycling and Upcycling

While recycling usually means the materials are remade into their original form, e.g., recycling plastic bottles into plastic polymers, which then produce plastic bottles through the manufacturing process, upcycling adds more value to the materials, as the name suggested. According to Watson & Wolfe "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 value or environmental value."
Similarly, recycle art may refer to art pieces using used materials in their original form while upcycle art may involve a transformation process such as breaking down, reforming, reassembling, and the like.
A common concept in Recycling is the 3Rs, which represent Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. According to The Upcycle Artist's Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Creating Art from Waste published by Upcycle Art And Craft Society. They coined a 3Rs principle for upcycling: Rethink, Reform, and Reborn.
"Rethink" involves reevaluating something and looking at an item from a new perspective. It means seeing the potential for repurposing, giving it a new function, or exploring other creative possibilities for that material. "Reform" involves physically altering the item, either by dismantling it, combining it with other materials, or using different techniques to change its form. This transformation of existing materials creates a new structure that better suits the artist's creative vision. "Reborn" is the final outcome when the upcycled item is given new life or purpose. It's like a resurrection of cast-offs that are given a second life"

Applications

Art

Upcycle Art or sometimes known as Recycled Art or Recycl’Art is the transformation of waste or used materials and objects into art pieces.
The tradition of reusing found objects in mainstream art came of age sporadically through the 20th century, although it has long been a means of production in folk art. The Amish quilt, for example, came about through reapplication of salvaged fabric. Simon Rodia's Watts Towers in Los Angeles exemplifies upcycling of scrap metal, pottery and broken glass on a grand scale; it consists of 17 structures, the tallest reaching over 30 meters into the Watts skyline.
Intellectually, upcycling bears some resemblance to the ready-made art of Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists. Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel, a front wheel and fork attached to a common stool, is among the earliest of these works, while Fountain, a common urinal purchased at a hardware store, is arguably his best-known work. Pablo Picasso's Bull's Head, a sculpture made from a discarded bicycle saddle and handlebars, is the Spanish painter's sly nod to the Dadaists. 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.
The idea of consciously raising the inherent value of recycled objects as a political statement, however, rather than presenting recycled objects as a reflection or outcome from the means of production, is largely a late 20th-century concept. Romuald Hazoumé, an artist from the West African Bénin, was heralded in 2007 for his use of discarded plastic gasoline and fuel canisters to resemble traditional African masks at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany. 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." Jeff Wassmann, an American artist who has lived in Australia for the past 25 years, uses items found on beaches and junk stores in his travels to create the early Modern works of a fictional German relative, Johann Dieter Wassmann. In Vorwarts , 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. Wassmann is unusual among artists in that he does not sell his work, rather they are presented as gifts; by not allowing these works to re-enter the consumer cycle, he averts the commodification of his end product.
Max Zorn is a Dutch tape artist who creates artwork from ordinary brown packaging tape and hangs pieces on street lamps as a new form of street art at night. By adding and subtracting layers of tape on acrylic glass with a surgical scalpel, the artwork can only be visible when light is placed behind it, mimicking the effects similar to stained glass window methods. His technique with pioneering upcycling with street art has been featured at Frei-Cycle 2013, the first design fair for recycling and upcycling in Freiburg, Germany.

Music

A prominent example is the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura in Paraguay. The instruments of the orchestra are made from materials taken from the landfill of Asunción, whose name comes from the Cateura lagoon in the area. A limited part of its real history is narrated in the film Landfill Harmonic.

Industry

Many industrial processes, like plastic, paint, and electronic fabrication, rely on the consumption of finite resources. Furthermore, the waste may have an environmental impact and can affect human health. Within this context, upcycling describes the use of available and future technologies to reduce waste and resource consumption by creating a product with a higher value from waste or byproduct streams.
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. The re-manufactured product has a higher value than disposing or downcycling it. The use of Brewer's spent grain, a waste product of brewing processes, as a substrate in biogas processes eliminates the need for disposal and can generate significant profit to the overall brewing process. Depending on the substrate's price, a profit of approximately 20% of the operational costs is possible. In this process, the biogas plant acts as an "upcycler".