Recycle vs Upcycle
We often hear about recycling paper, plastic, and glass as a means of conserving resources and minimizing waste. Recycling encourages people to send their used products to buy-back centers and collection facilities, where materials are sorted and processed into new products. Upcycling is a related concept that can cause confusion, as many people are not familiar with it and use the terms interchangeably. This article aims to clarify the differences between recycling and upcycling by highlighting their distinct features.
Recycle
When you buy a plastic box full of cookies and discard it after consuming the contents, you contribute to consumerism by sending products to the landfill. However, if you keep the plastic box and use it to store biscuits or other leftovers, you help reduce waste and conserve materials. Recycling is a specific process of conservation and waste reduction in which products undergo a chemical process to be transformed into new products. For example, paper is recycled to make new paper, various glass products are crushed to create new glass, and plastic boxes are melted down to produce new plastic items.
Recycling paper saves trees and helps improve our environment. It also conserves electricity and oil, which is beneficial and should be encouraged to help protect our environment and minimize waste.
Upcycle
Upcycling is similar to recycling, with the primary difference being that the new product has equal or greater value. Two other features of upcycling include no downgrade of the original product quality and no pollution during the upcycling process. Therefore, recycled paper, which is lower in quality than the original paper used to create it, is not upcycled. If window casings, shingles, bricks, etc., from a demolished building are used in the construction of a new house, it is an example of upcycling. Likewise, when old car tires are repurposed to create something of higher value, it is considered upcycling.
Key Takeaways
- Both recycling and upcycling save money and resources, but recycling is more expensive, and the new products made are typically inferior in quality to the original products. In contrast, upcycling results in goods of equal or higher value.
- Recycling involves breaking down old products and using chemical processes to convert them into new products while using other resources. In contrast, upcycling involves little or no change to the composition of the old product and may utilize some new resources to create something of higher value.
- Recycling changes the form of the product, while upcycling requires little or no alteration to the item’s form.
