What is Upcycling Anyway?

Upcycling is just as it sounds: upping the life cycle of an item. The term was popularized by Belgian entrepreneur and founder of the Zero Emissions Research Initiative (ZERI) Gunter Pauli in his 1999 book Upcycling. The term was further developed by German chemist Michael Braungart and American architect William McDonough in their groundbreaking 2002 book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things. In the book, the authors outline an alternative to the way industry typically "takes, makes and wastes": that industry can actually make products that generate value.

This is the standard definition of upcycling: "the process of converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of better quality or a higher environmental value”.

So what's the difference between upcycling and recycling?

The best way to explain this is with an example. Let's look at a newspaper.

"Downcycling" is the fancy term for throwing something away. So downcycling a newspaper looks like this:

Not so useful. Smelly. Takes up space.

Recycling involves turning a waste item into something else of equal or lesser value. So, for our newspaper, that would be something like this:

In most cases, the recycling life cycle is finite because materials degenerate with each stage of recycling (metals are the exception, which just might be why the scrap metal industry is so lucrative).

As mentioned above, upcycling involves turning a waste item into something of long-lasting, greater value. So here, our newspaper is reinvented beautifully by The Women’s Multipurpose Co-operative in the Phillipines (and sold by Ten Thousand Villages).

The possibilities of upcycling are as limitless as your imagination.