THIS week’s column piece is yet again another discussion on the earth and our role to help clean it up. Since the dawn of the industrial era, we’ve been increasingly polluting the place we are supposed to call home. We are actively killing the place that gives us life. I often use this space to speak on social justice and issues but how much good will that do if I don’t also incorporate the very ground we stand on? It makes no sense we make all this progress as a species, only to not have a home at the end of it all. As discussed last week, every day the earth produces millions of tons of waste. We simply dump it and get on with life.

With that in mind, I have witnessed people turning “trash” into “treasure” or “upcycle” their waste. I remembered for my Grade Nine Examination many moons ago, we were asked to make household decor or items with recycled materials. I am sure that my broken CD and plastic bottle floral vase is on top of some teacher’s desk instead of in a dump site. At the time, I didn’t conceptualise it but, yet still, I appreciated the sense of purpose it allowed me to feel at the time. The concept of turning “trash” into something useful again completely makes sense to me and I don’t understand why more people don’t do it.

You can recycle and break down a material or waste by breaking down or “downcycling” the material and creating a new product. Another alternative to reduce waste, however, is repurposed trash or “upcycling”. Unlike recycling that breaks down materials and creates new products, upcycling is basically reusing the item in a different way or refashioning it. In upcycling, waste is seen as a resource or material to use. My mom is a coffee lover, so she usually purchases coffee in glass bottles. She’d also occasionally make pepper sauce, “achar” and other pickles for our house to use. She’d clean her coffee bottles thoroughly to prevent contamination and then add her pickles in.

When I asked her why she did this, her response was, “I can’t throw away these good bottles. I have to put them to good use. It also saves me money to not go and buy storage containers as well”. My mother is giving those coffee bottles a longer lifespan for their use. She’s giving them another purpose instead of allowing them to end up in a landfill.

The purpose of “upcycling” is not to always save money or even make more money (when selling) because, at the end of the day, the concept is to reduce waste and improve the quality of our environment. It’s a practice that should be encouraged more. You can use bottles as vases, turn old clothes into cleaning cloths, turn old toothbrushes as a cleaning brush, turn cardboard tubes from tissues as craft supplies. There are also many other ways to be creative and innovative, you just have to channel your inner artist or inventor.

Apart from household projects, there are also some people who turn this into a business as well. They make products to sell using repurposed waste materials. You can make tote bags out of old T-shirts or make decor pieces out of used popsicle sticks. Whether you’re creative with it for business, or you’re simply a mom looking at ways to reduce waste while saving money—I hope you understand that your role is important in helping the environment around you. No matter how small a contribution is to saving the environment, it creates a bigger impact when it adds up.