Upcycled Design: Applying Nature’s Principles to Personal Design

Upcycling takes a used product and uses it again in a way that increases its value. Recycling, or downcycling, on the other hand, takes a used product and turns it into something with less value by extracting what is still valuable and throwing away the rest. This is a wasteful process—and a polluting one—with many unusable by-products. In the following example of practical ethics applied to personal sustainability from Rob Peters, nature’s principles cross over into personal use as a way to surround yourself with principles that are upcycled, or principles reused for something as great, or greater, than they previously were.

The Common Denominator Between Aesthetics, Efficiency, and Ethics