The term 'Upcycling' was coined in the late 1990s by Gunter Pauli and Johannes Hartkemeyer.
Creative re-use, refurbishing, repair or even just refreshing!
A little imagination and something that is not longer serving its purpose can be given a second life along with a new aesthetic and functions. The upcycled product can be more practical, solve another problem and even be more beautiful than it was before.
Upcycling is a practice which can be taken up from sprucing up your home/office interiors to even your fashion choices. It extends the life cycle of materials/products while giving them a brand new purpose.
It is important to remember that upcycling is different from recycling, Recycling takes materials like plastic, paper, metal and glass ,breaks them down so their base materials can be remade into a new product. Upcycling does not break down the original material/product, it simply means re-fashioning it into something else.
From a large scale perspective, upcycling contributes to reducing the CO2 emissions, as lifetime of used materials is extended and also as no extra energy is required in extracting components or making new things from the scratch.
Upcycling and Fashion
Upcycling in fashion can be done using both pre-consumer or post-consumer waste or a combination of the two. Production processes in the fashion industry demands extremely high amounts of water, energy and polluting chemicals and other resources. The environmental stressers are also many a times accompanied with unethical supply chains.
In the leather industry, the way in which leather is traditionally cut and used, there are seemingly usable pieces that fall on the cutting floor and are discarded each day, these mostly end up in the waste and ultimately in the landfills. We source these leather off-cuts from manufacturers and brands and sort them into usable pieces and transform them into jewelry. We wish to make our bit of difference and restore the usable quality pieces into products with design as a key tool.
