Australia -Creative Upcycling

We live in a throw away consumerist society. Once something that was made for a certain purpose comes to the end of it’s (usually short) life span as ‘something useful’, more often then not it is thrown away. It joins the forgotten others in the forever growing pile of waste that will exist in disregard.

What is Upcycling?

A new term I have stumbled across, that isn’t even in my Oxford American Dictionary is ‘Upcycling’ which Wikipedia defines as

Upcycling is the process of converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of better quality or a higher environmental value. The goal of upcycling is to prevent wasting potentially useful materials by making use of existing ones.

The opposite of upcycling is downcycling which involves converting materials and products into new materials of LESSER quality.

Ethikl

Ethikl is a marketplace for ethically sourced, handmade and fair trade products sold directly by the producers. All of the products are one-of-a-kind pieces from gourmet food to handmade jewellery. You won’t find anything mass produced and social networking features on the site allow people to meet the makers of all the amazing ethical products, providing a way to make buying decisions that favour fair trade, cruelty free, organic, recycled, handmade or local.

VelvetBean's cat Sash. About as close to animal testing as it gets!

VelvetBean

VelvetBean is one of the producers on Ethikl who sews together feature cushions made from upcycled burlap sacks that were previously used to transport green coffee beans around the world and were destined for the landfill.
The sacks are immersed into a warm bubble bath and left to soak the stresses of their previous life away. They are then air dried, cut and sewn into stunning feature pieces just waiting to take pride of place in your home.




Velvet Bean: ‘Home Beautiful Magazine Australia’ as a giveaway  in 2010 to For Greenies readers.

To help you get your creative juices flowing here are some examples of DIY upcycling

Creating lawn furniture from old pallets

Create a wallet from a bike tyre inner tube

Creating baby slippers out of old wool sweaters and leather jackets

Spain Upcycle - Katcha Bilek

  

From the designer who dislikes waste, Katcha Bilek presents her collection of stylish & versatile bags & belts, crocodiles & chandeliers, from upcycled, recycled & reclaimed materials.
Katcha began selling her upcycled inner-tube bags in Spain from the late nineties. Living in an out-of-service fire engine as she travelled across Europe, she was regularly found selling them out of the back to passers by!



“They were in demand,” she says, “because they were an intelligent alternative to animal skins, and boring high-street copies and people realised this. The bags and bike tyre belts are robust and versatile – perfect for living on the road, and for an urban lifestyle too.
I think because they are design-led and hand-crafted, people were attracted to them – my methods cut out industrial machinery and any chance of unethical practices. Plus, each piece is completely unique – you might cut the same design from an inner-tube, but the final result will always be slightly different."
Her designs have an intrinsic element of relaying environmental issues. “Promoting awareness of the environment and of the raw resources and materials we consume daily  are essential components in all of my creations.”
Katcha continually expresses her love of design, beauty and originality through transforming discarded materials and objects she finds on a scavenge, fashioning them into useful, well-designed pieces.

From the designer who dislikes waste, Katcha Bilek presents her collection of stylish, resilient bags & belts from upcycled, recycled & reclaimed inner-tubes, bike tyres and car seatbelts. An intelligent alternative to animal skins & high street copies, the Katcha Bilek line is robust and versatile - perfect for a busy urban lifestyle, and compromises on neither style nor ethics.

 

http://www.etsy.com/shop/katchabilek