Recycled architecture is more than just novelty structures and offbeat buildings made from bottles, cans and tires – though those can be pretty cool in their own right. It’s a way to put recycled materials to use on a large scale, reduce the tremendous amount of waste typically produced during construction and stimulate creativity. In fact, the challenge of seeing salvaged and recycled materials in a new way can help break up monotonous architectural norms, even when applied to major modern projects like community centers and museums.

The act of repurposing reclaimed materials often becomes part of the aesthetic, a conscious choice to highlight the building’s sustainability factor or just raise awareness about the potential of items like shipping containers. But sometimes, you can’t tell by a glance. Materials like reclaimed tiles, recycled concrete, salvaged wood and innovative new synthetics made of waste products enable a little more subtlety and elegance.

Modern architecture made of recycled materials can help raise the profile of greener approaches to building, move the industry as a whole closer to closed-loop ideals and even preserve physical connections between past, present and future.

Carrying Pieces of the Past Into the Future

Set at the foot of China’s Taihang Mountains, rural Luotuowan village suffered from a period of decline as the country focused on expanding its urban centers, and the bulk of its structures became dilapidated. When the local government finally invested in a mass re-roofing project, many residents opted for an affordable contemporary concrete option. But making the whole village safer didn’t have to mean discarding the beautiful wooden beams from their old houses. LUO Studios, which specializes in sustainable architecture, took those old beams and transformed them into a low-cost, low-waste sculptural canopy inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller, with the villagers assisting in the building process.The result creates a shaded gathering place for the community, and offers a reminder of Luotuowan’s past.

The stratified facade of the new SOS Children’s Villages Lavezzorio Community Center in Chicago calls to mind layers of rock and sediment beneath the surface of the earth, suggesting growth and the passage of time – but it’s also a physical reflection of the way in which the material was sourced. Studio Gang Architects used concrete aggregate waste from construction sites around the Chicago area as a major component of the building, pouring it from each source in turn to create a sort of anonymized visual record of change throughout the city. Artistic and symbolic, this choice adds to the beauty of the building, gives it a sense of enhanced identity and reduces waste all at once without shouting its recycled nature from across the street.

Though best known for his stunning timber structures, Japanese architect Kengo Kuma is deft at making smart use of other materials as well, as seen here in the China Academy of Arts’ Folk Museum. The complex in Hangzhou recycles the old roof tiles of local houses into its own sculptural terraced roof as well as a shade screen along some of the open walls. “Their sizes are all different, and that helps the architecture merge into the ground naturally,” says Kuma.

In Mexico City, Alonso de Garay Architects continue a local trend of transforming the remains of dilapidated old buildings into modern architecture with ‘Recycled Building,’ an apartment complex with 26 units. Noting that these structures were too damaged to use thanks to “decades of carelessness and decay,” the architects see the act of recycling them into a contemporary building as a sensitive process of renewal, albeit one the that has helped transform these areas into some of “the most expensive and desired” in the city, contributing to the displacement of lower income residents (which is not exactly sustainable.)

Finding Surprising Uses for Mundane Waste Materials

Visible soda cans, beer bottles and tires incorporated into buildings are most often associated with the quirky nature of “earthships,” a type of passive solar earth shelter made of natural and up cycled materials. Whimsical and sculptural, these thermally heated and cooled buildings are about as sustainable as contemporary architecture gets, but they aren’t for everyone (or every climate). That doesn’t mean architects can’t use some of the same recycling tricks for modern buildings, with results that have less of a handmade appearance.

Designer Hyunje Joo came up with an innovative facade for a building in South Korea made of repurposed plastic baskets, giving the old building a facelift that diffuses sunlight, adds privacy and can be dismantled and recycled when the structure is demolished. 1,500 of the semi-transparent baskets create a screened envelope around the building.

“The surface minimizes the separation between the inside and outside, as light and silhouettes beyond the space show through. Over the course of the day, changes show on the surface of the wall due to the diffusion and reflection of the material. The passage of time is more actively sensed from both inside and outside, as these light effects stimulate our senses.”

Can you guess what Shau Bandung architects used to create the pixelated facade on this Microlibrary in Kampung, Indonesia? Believe it or not, they’re ice cream containers.

“As the building is located in a tropical climate, we aimed to create a pleasant indoor climate without the use of air conditioning. Therefore, we looked  for available façade materials in the neighborhood that were cost efficient, could shade the interior, let daylight pass and enable enough cross ventilation. Initially, we found several small vendors selling used, white and translucent jerry cans. However, prior to construction the jerry cans were no longer available in the quantities we required. Instead, we found used plastic ice cream buckets that were being sold in bulk. This turned out for the better as they have a more positive image and are more stable when cutting the bottom open for cross ventilation.”

From afar, you might not even guess that there’s anything unusual about this office building in Shanghai. The unusual facade material chosen for ‘Can Cube’ doesn’t reveal itself until you get much closer. Archi-Union Architects used a system of used aluminum soda cans enclosed in an aluminum frame, explaining that up cycling the cans for a new purpose in their current form actually saves more energy and materials than sending them through the standard recycling process to reclaim the metal.

“Enclosing them in an aluminium frame keeps the structure light and easily adjustable by its occupants. Window-sash type sections within the façade provide the user with full control of sunlight/daylight in all seasons. The façade works alongside underground heating and cooling devices, rainwater filtration and solar energy systems, which all provide more efficiency and minimize the wastage of energy.”

Citizens of Thessaloniki, Greece can bring their plastic household waste to a “zero waste lab,” use software to design their own custom recycled street furniture and watch it take form via 3D printer. The project is the latest from “Print Your City,” a creative initiative by Dutch research and design studio The New Raw that combines DIY urbanism interventions with smart use of freely available materials.

The team hopes to create circular waste streams within the city, engaging local residents in the process and enhancing public spaces at the same time. Print Your City takes municipal plastic waste, grinds it up into pellets or flakes and feeds it into 3D printers to produce street furniture that’s extremely tough and durable.

With this project, the power to shape the looks and functionality of public furniture is in the hands of the people who will be using it – a concept that could be extended to all sorts of endeavors to contribute to a more equitable world. Residents turned furniture designers can come up with virtually any shape or color they want, add features like built-in planters or bike racks and decide where their creation should be placed.

The New Raw’s initial prototype for the Thessaloniki project was a half bench, half planter that required about 100kg of plastic waste to create, noting that the average EU citizen generates about 31kg each year. A bunch of the prototypes were placed around Thessaloniki’s Nea Paralia waterfront promenade to gauge public interest and the city responded with over 3,000 user-submitted designs, some of which will begin to appear in the city’s Hanth Park this month.

“Plastic has a design failure,” says Print Your City founders Panos Sakkas and Foteini Setaki. “It is designed to last forever, but often we use it once and throw it away. With Print Your City, we endeavor to show a better way of using plastic in long lasting and high value applications.”

You know how China stopped taking our plastic recycling waste because Americans can’t seem to figure out how which items are actually recyclable and which ones clog up the machines and contaminate the resulting materials? Now that China’s ban on imported plastics has gone into effect, we have a whole lot of unwanted stuff to contend with. At this point, it’s clear that robots are very likely the future of recycling, helping to sort through refuse and remove non-recyclable items so people don’t have to. But they could be useful in the interim, too, as proven by the ‘Trashpresso’ mobile solar-powered recycling plant.

Every day, more than 100 million plastic bottles are thrown away, says Miniwiz, creator of the Trashpresso – which turns plastic waste into surprisingly beautiful tiles. Each Trashpresso machine is housed on a 40-foot container platform that can be moved anywhere on a tractor trailer. It needs a lot of solar panels to operate, so they’re kept on a separate 20-foot container platform.

The Trashpresso is capable of up cycling up to 50kg of waste per hour by shredding, washing, air drying, dehumidifying and baking the plastics. An air and water filter keeps the machine from spewing any toxic byproducts of the process into the surrounding environment. It takes about the same amount of energy to transform 800 plastic bottles into 160 tiles as it does to run four washing machines for six hours. The process has a zero water footprint, since water is looped back through the process after filtration.

It takes about five #1 PET plastic bottles to create a single tile, while 5 caps and ringlets can be turned into about 1/20th of a tile. Durable, versatile and water-resistant, the hexagonal tiles can be used for both practical and decorative purposes. Since they’re so compact, they’re a lot easier to transport than bundles of unrecycled plastic waste, and they can be upcycled themselves one time after they’re created.

As a matter of fact, the Trashpresso brings to mind one of the future jobs predicted at the recent World Economic Forum Annual Meeting: a robotic landfill recycler that sorts through the trash we’ve thrown away to find usable items and bundle them up for recycling.

Dispose of your empty plastic bottle in this little sidewalk kiosk, and it’ll dispense enough food to feed a stray cat or dog. Aiming to help both the environment and homeless animals, the vending machine by Turkish company Pugedon operates at no cost to the city since the value of the plastic pays for the food.

Referred to by the company as ‘ecological life support,’ the vending machine is an answer to a pressing problem in Istanbul: around 150,000 stray cats and dogs. Anyone passing by with a little bottled water can also choose to empty the rest of their water into the machine for the animals.

These animals generally rely on the kindness of local residents to survive, and while some love having them around, others believe they’re dangerous and a source of disease. The locals who host Facebook campaigns to gather supplies to care for the animals are countered by attempts to poison them.

While this vending machine isn’t an answer to the problem of homeless animals, it does offer an interesting compromise to care for them without putting a burden on Istanbul residents or the city.

Most of us view trash as something that should remain unseen, whisked away in the most sanitary manner possible so that we don’t have to think about it too much. But outside Cairo is an informal entire city brimming with it. It towers into the air. It is stacked on sidewalks and rooftops. But this is not just an inadvertent dumping ground: the area is an active, bustling micro-metropolis, built around, filled with and ultimately sustained by junk.

Garbage City, as it’s known, has long been the ultimate destination of all of Cairo’s trash. Here, a community of people called the Zabbaleen view trash as a way of life. As depicted in the documentary Garbage Dreams, the Zabbaleen scratch out a living by carting away the trash from Cairo’s streets and then sorting through it, recycling 80% of it and feeding the remaining organic matter to pigs, which provided meat and fertilizer.

Different families are known to specialize in different types of refuse, sorting cans, bottles or paper from one household to the next. Much of the area is without running water, working sewage or functioning electricity. But as Cairo’s population grows, so does the trash – and since authorities removed the pigs in 2009 due to swine flu, the trash is getting harder to manage.

Egyptian officials have made attempts to modernize the nation’s trash collection system, but the private companies they contract are unable to deal with the constant flow in the highly efficient manner of the Zabbaleen.

As the Zabbaleen speak out to raise awareness of their plight, collecting funds to purchase lands for recycling schools, others – like Mekano Architects – imagine solutions that could work for all involved.

Mekano Architects envisions a way to recycle the trash into a vertical city called Seeds of Life, a skyscraper consisting of towering ‘wind stalks’ that support stacked modular homes. The organic garbage would be used to harvest biogas, and other waste could be turned into building materials. The tubes that support the structures would actually collect wind energy, and also distribute water and electricity throughout the development.