What Is Upcycling? All You Need to Know

Recycling and upcycling are two practices that protect the environment by repurposing waste materials that would otherwise go to a landfill. Although upcycling and recycling have the same goal, their procedures might vary considerably. People are more familiar with the phrase “recycling,” which refers to reusing a product after its useful life has come to an end but before being disposed of as waste. The way we use plastic would be a good example of this. To recycle a plastic product, it is sorted, transported to a factory, processed into plastic pellets, and then used to create a new product. Plastic is affected by the recycling process, so that the new product will be of lower quality than the original product.

Similar to recycling, upcycling starts with the goal of reusing a product to extend its useful life before being disposed of as garbage, but unlike recycling, it repurposes previously used products to make something more valuable. For instance, upcycling can fashion gorgeous necklaces out of the inner tubes of used and discarded tires.

To summarize, upcycling uses resources like paper, metal, plastic, or glass; recycling uses the same materials but breaks them down to produce a new product (typically of inferior quality). On the other hand, the objective of upcycling is to re-purpose and incorporate used materials into an assortment of new goods. As we’ve seen, upcycling entails sorting and reusing materials in a different, frequently more trendy way rather than dismantling them. Recycling does not involve a lot of imagination. It only takes correctly classifying your waste (i.e., understanding what can be recycled or not) to recycle various products. By contrast, upcycling is more than just giving an old item of clothes or furniture some makeover and involves elements of imagination and creative thinking.