UPCYCLING
DESIGN
The circular economy identifies two main sustainable process techniques within design:
Recycling
and
Upcycling.
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These two terms are often used interchangeably but in reality they have a completely different meaning. It is therefore necessary to make an important distinction between the two areas of interest, in order to open the doors to some broader reasoning on material culture, as well as on the meaning of the concept of sustainability within the world of design.
History of terminology
The term Upcycling comes from Upsizing, the title of the German edition of a book on upcycling published in 1998 in English by economist Gunter Paoli, while later, in 1999, it was published with the revised title “Upcycling”. 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 taken up and expanded in 2002 by authors William McDonough and Michael Braungart in the book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. The text analyses the theme of upcycling, which sees as its focal point the prevention of waste of potentially useful material, through the reuse of existing material, in order to reduce the consumption of raw materials during the creation of new products and, consequently, energy, as well as air pollution, water pollution and even greenhouse gas emissions.
We refer to a recycling process when, for example, to produce the diffuser of a lamp, a used glass bottle is used which, through a fusion process, is recycled to transform itself into a diffuser. Differently, using the same intact and original bottle with the aim of creating the diffuser of the lamp, we refer to an upcycling process, in which therefore, the object remains unchanged while changing its functional destiny. The examples given therefore make the substantial difference between the two arts clear;
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in the practice of recycling, the reuse of the material is foreseen after having carried out a fusion, crushing or other step, returning the material to the state of raw material, while the practice of upcycling involves the creation of a new object through the complete or partial reuse of the object itself for a purpose that can be the same, or even completely distorted, compared to the reason for which it was created in the beginning.
English: Reusing a product or part of it, without having to downcycle it, is a conceptually higher and, consequently, more interesting act. The practice of upcycling gives things a second existence and allows objects to be reborn in another form with an intrinsic value that is almost always higher than the one they had at the origin of their first life. The reinvention of an object, starting from parts of discarded objects, becomes an even more precious act when it comes to pieces that have their own uniqueness and history.
In the past, it was very common, especially in peasant culture, to practice what we now call upcycling; an example of this was seen in the use of the legs of a broken chair that, when joined to other pieces, gave birth to a small table. In this way, imaginative objects were created, sometimes perhaps a little funny, but undoubtedly functional and unique in their kind.
Of course, it must be considered that not everything can be “upcycled”, but as far as possible, it is a more efficient system, in economic terms and in terms of environmental impact, than pure and simple recycling. In fact, upcycling is the opposite of downcycling, which is the most common practice in the recycling process, as downcycling necessarily involves the conversion of products into new materials, and most of the time of lower quality. The practice of downcycling occurs in the absence of the possibility of returning the materials to their original quality, as for example when processed aluminum alloys are melted in order to produce lower quality casting alloys. Conversely, the upcycling of materials, in a thermodynamic sense, is made possible only by adding more energy in order to improve the quality of the material.
The guiding questions to ask when evaluating the recovery of waste objects are:
How much energy is needed to restore the recovered material into the desired material or product?
How does this amount compare to obtaining the desired material or product from virgin material or primary sources?
In some cases, little energy is needed to reuse a waste product, such as second-hand clothing, while there are cases where the energy needed to recover the materials is greater than the energy available to process the virgin material. In interior design, through upcycling, we can see a fruit crate take on the function of a flower vase, a damaged vinyl decorate a lamp cover or even a colander transform into a ceiling light. Upcycling allows creativity to marry the values ​​of sustainability to give life to an infinite series of possibilities for reusing a product otherwise destined for the waste bin.
