Interesting things made from recycled materials
The world is full of rubbish generated by humans and it’s become a huge environmental problem. As we become more aware of the importance of reducing waste and recycling, people have started to get creative with discarded products.
Despite an increased awareness of waste reduction and recycling, the world still generates a huge amount of waste.
Recycling is the process of converting waste into reusable material. It consists of a series of industrial processes that allows new raw materials to be generated from materials that in their current form have no use. Fortunately it is becoming easier and easier to find items made from recycled products, which hopefully means that the world is becoming a more sustainable place. Creative is king when it comes to goods made from recycled materials, options are almost limitless.
A football field in Russia with artificial turf was created from 50,000 plastic cups and used during the 2018 World Cup.
Textiles is an industry renowned for struggling to produce environmentally friendly and sustainable products, but recycling is making giant strides. It’s now possible to buy super made from recycled plastic bottles and shoes made from chewing gum (sounds a little disgusting - but they’re surprisingly impressive).
Entrepreneur Alberto Gonzalez created the first bike that’s made almost entirely of plastics. The Urban GC1, is road bicycle made primarily of of ‘kraft paper’ and has a recycled polystyrene paint coating making it rain resistant. It might sound a little dangerous riding a bike made almost entirely of paper, but seeing as its waterproof, it’s surprisingly robust.
Every year more than one and a half million tonnes of chewing gum is removed from the streets of the Netherlands. Gumshoe is a trainer company brand that makes the soles of their trainers entirely from chewing gum thrown on the streets of Amsterdam.
Ecoalf is a clothing company that manufactures garments from recycled material. They use a mixture of recycled plastic bottles, tyres, nylon, cotton and wool to make their products. The underpinning rationale for their business is "Because there is no planet B". 10% of all sales goes towards ocean clean up programmes, as a means of demonstrating their commitment to the environment.
Birò O2 is an electric two-seater car made from 80% recycled plastic.
The philosophy of Broch & Broch is to use the small pieces of leftover leather from other products to make quality, ecologically friendly leather products, such as handbags, briefcases and backpacks.
Kalahari is a brand that used recycled glass bottles to make necklaces, bracelets and other jewellery.
The Spanish eco-fashion brand Ecoalf have created flip flops that are 100% made from recycled tyres. They’re fashionable, durable and most importantly environmentally friendly.
Large quantities of plastic bottles that are thrown away every day are being used a house bricks by one charity. The ‘Casas de Botellas’ project helps people living in extreme poverty to build houses with discarded plastic bottles. To create a solid structure, the bottles are filled with sand and fixed together with concrete like mixture made from mud sand or earth. Once dried this mixture produced a strong and solid structure.
More and more brands are making sustainable sunglasses made from recycled material. SEA2SEE uses the plastic from fishing nets and other waste commonly found at sea to make their sunglasses.
Ecodeco is an eco-furniture company that uses pallets, fruit boxes and other products to make shelves, tables and other recycled furniture.
Patagonia is a company that has been manufacturing high quality mountain clothes for decades. The one in the photo is a fleece lining from their recycled polyester collection. To manufacture the fibres for the fleeces, they use plastic waste along with off cuts from other garments.
Easybrick is company that makes bricks from recycled plastic. Each brick is made from 330 recycled fizzy drinks bottle tops. In Argentina about 12 million bottle tops are thrown away everyday, that’s enough to produce 36,360 bricks. The idea is simple but innovative, an ecological brick made of bottle tops that are easy to use and contributes to sustainable construction.
There is a lot of waste from the process of 3D printing. Many materials are thrown away as a result of useless prototype printing and mistakes during the printing process. A Canadian entrepreneur came up with the idea of recycling these waste products and turning them into filaments that can be used once again for 3D printing. His machine is called ProtoCycler and this young engineer is working to recycle other plastic components in addition to 3D printing cast-offs as a future venture.
