I’ve been reading alot lately about Recycling because my neighbourhood wants to go “green” etc. Lately Upcycling has also been mentioned alot and i know that Upcycling is more of a direct process than Recycling since i can just do upcycling from home. But which one’s actually better for the environment? Sorry, i hope my question is somewhat clear!
Thank you guys
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They are all marketing words without much of a clear meaning. What’s important is that you keep using the same things as much as possible instead of buying new things.
If you reuse a yoghurt pot to hold a seedling, so that you don’t have to go out and buy a pot for the seedling, that’s good. If you use it to hold pencils so you don’t have to buy a container for pencils, that’s good. But if you normally put your pencils in a pencil case and you weren’t going to buy a pot, it’s not really better than throwing it away. It’s just more clutter.
What you can do with a piece of trash depends on what the trash is. Upcycling is when you find a better use, downcycling is when you find a worse use. Using yoghurt pots to make clothing (somehow) may be considered upcycling; using them to patch holes in the wall may be considered downcycling. Using them to make more yoghurt pots is recycling. But that’s just marketing. Either way, you are still reusing trash instead of buying something new, and that’s the point.
You don’t get to choose “I want to do upcycling” vs “I want to do downcycling”. What you can do with the trash, depends on what the trash is.
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