What's Up with Upcycling?

We’ve heard of recycling for a long time but in recent years a new term has turned up --UPCYCLING!  

The term “Upcycling” was coined by the German engineer Reiner Pilz in 1994 during an interview about the European waste system where Reiner seemed to have been trying to diminish the idea of recycling by stating that recycling should really be called “downcycling” since it was a method of giving objects less value. Reiner was promoting a new idea of giving object more value after its initial use which he referred to as “upcycling”. The term upcycle was given additional popularity when William McDonough explored the idea of upcycling in his book Cradle to Cradle. 

Upcycling is simply the act of taking an item after its initial original use and giving it a second life or a new function. Whereas the recycling process breaks down a product to its base materials and use those materials to manufacture a different new product, for example, a recycled plastic bottle may turn into carpet, clothing, toys or  although rarely, another plastic bottle (with much lower quality). When upcycling an object is reused for the same original purpose it served, or repurposed in a different way without never having to breakdown its original chemistry to be utilized in a second life. 

Recycling is not bad, but upcycling is better! 

Although recycling has been around since the 1600s in the United States, due to lack of public commitment the recycling process still contains many inefficiencies and it requires a lot of energy and labor making it a low profit business and thus thwarting investor’s interest in recycling plants. Public recycling education and commitment plays a major role in recycling inefficiencies, TerraCycle CEO states that  “typically, 50% of what you put in your recycling bin is never recycled. It's sorted and thrown out”. The average citizen is still unaware that plastic bags, per se, are not recycled the same way as a plastic bottle. Recycling plants wastes tons of energy and labor just separating and sorting items that arrive at the plant but end up having to take half of the sorted items to a landfill. 

Whereas upcycling eliminates "process wastes" and physical wastes altogether.  McDonough argues that upcycling is not an environmental or ethical concept, yet an economical one. But I think it can certainly be all of the above it all depends on which lenses we decide to use when analyzing the issue. For an economist turning a mason jar into a flower vase means you will not have to spend the money to buy a vase; for an environmentalist it means that mason jar won’t end up in a landfill. This is certainly a very simplistic way of analyzing this issue, there are many other economical and environmental benefits of upcycling, nevertheless they are both very valid views. Others also argue that upcycling is really only achieved if an item makes it back up to the supply chain and is utilized again for its original purpose in its original form. We certainly need to get to a point where manufacturers truly achieve circular supply chains but that's not to say that for now we can't or shouldn't be upcycling in a variety of ways.

There are ways to upcycle basically anything these days just type the word “upcycle” into Pinterest’s search bar and BoOoOoMmM…. an explosion of images will pop-up on how to upcylcle anything from a wine cork to an airplane engine. But until this day, by far, the best example of upcycling I have seen were of train carriages turned into hostel. 

Train carriages that just a few years ago took passengers from Zurich to Rome overnight made a final stop at the Amsterdam-Sloterdijk station and it now serves as a unique hostel experience for adventurer travelers. The owner chose to keep the train's charm by maintaining most of the  original structure intact and turning the old sleeping compartments into shared rooms and the restaurant  compartment into a common area where guests mingle and where the reception and a bistro is located.

I was recently in Amsterdam and I was very curious, and to be honest a little skeptical, to experience  this upcycling hostel lodging but I ended up being absolutely delighted with the entire adventure. Not only did I feel like I was being an eco-traveler by promoting this unique upcycling effort, I actually had a much better experience than at many other hostels I had previously visited.  If you are an adventurer traveler and environmentally conscious the Train Lodge is definitely something to experience while in Amsterdam. 

So why is this such a fantastic upcycling project? Think about what would happen to these non-operational train carriages if it had not been turned into a hostel; would it just sit at an old station taking up space and becoming a sore image with absolutely no use? Would it have been stripped down for metal recycling with the remains ending up in a landfill? Well we will never know, what we do know is that instead of building yet another structure in the city to make it into a hostel someone had the brilliant idea of turning something that no longer served its purpose into something useful, unique and beautiful -- and to me there is no better description of upcycling.