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.”

There’s already more than enough plastic, glass and other materials in the world for all of our manufacturing needs – we just have to reclaim and recycle it instead of trying to bury it. For some designers, finding a way to spin trash into treasure is simply the only way forward as our natural environment is increasingly threatened by human activity. Creating closed-loop systems that not only use responsibly sourced raw materials but also account for where they end up when the product’s life has come to an end could make a huge impact, but the idea has to catch on within entire industries. These 13 projects, from sunglasses to pavilions, prove that sustainable design can be just as smart, useful and beautiful as its conventional counterparts.

SHIFT Flexible Shelf System Made of Upcycled Textiles

Upcycled textile maker Really? and Benjamin Hubert’s design studio LAYER present SHIFT, a flexible shelving system produced for textile manufacturer Kvadrat made from up cycled waste textiles from the fashion and textile industries. The wall system starts out as a flat acoustic panel, but just pull on the edges of each colored rectangle and pull the support tabs in place, and you’ve got surprisingly sturdy shelves. The system requires no hardware, machining grooves into the boards to make them flexible, retaining the characteristics of its source materials.

‘New Clothes’ Furnishing Collection by Pentatonic Made of Fashion Waste

Pentatonic, a furniture company turning trash into treasure with unique recycled collections, presents the ‘New Clothes’ series made of waste from the fashion industry. The range includes hangers, cushions, chairs, tables and accessories with a collaged look thanks to the company’s unique process of grouping hand-curated fabric scraps and transforming them into three-dimensional objects using thermal lamination.

4 Recycled Sea Waste Projects by Parley for the Oceans

Leave it to Parley for the Oceans, a project bringing creatives, thinkers and leaders together to end ocean destruction, to turn plastic cleaned from the water into all kinds of cool stuff. The organization teams up with big-name brands to transform this trash into consumer products people actually want to wear and use. Most recently, it collaborated with beer maker Corona to create ‘Clean Waves,’ a series of sunglasses made in Italy from the plastic the group harvests from the oceans and beaches they work to protect. New products in the ‘Clean Waves’ series are forthcoming.

Parley also worked with Soma to produce a reusable BPA-free glass bottle with a sleeve sourced from 90% ocean plastic, the equivalent of two plastic bottles. It’s exclusively available at Starbucks.

UltraBOOST is a series of three new sneaker designs from Parley x ADIDAS with an outer woven from 95 percent ocean plastic that has been made into yarn. The laces, heel lining, heel webbing and sock liners are all made of recycled PET plastic, too. Previously, Parley and ADIDAS collaborated on a 3D printed shoe made from collected plastic waste from the oceans, including gill nets.

“The industry can’t afford to wait for directions any longer. Together with the network of Parley for the Oceans, we have started taking action and creating new sustainable materials and innovation for athletes,” says Eric Liedtke, Adidas executive board member. “The 3D-printed ocean plastic shoe midsole stands for how we can set new industry standards if we start questioning the reason of what we create. We want to bring everyone from the industry to the table and create sustainable solutions for big global problems.”

Hexagonal Recycled Polystyrene Stools by Andreu Carulla

Designed by Andreu Carulla for El Celler de Can Roca, a world class zero-waste restaurant in Catalonia, the RR201 series of polystyrene stools is made from the expanded polystyrene boxes used by eatery to store and transport food. Notoriously difficult to recycle, the material is cleaned, shredded and compacted into a mould. Steam is injected to make the shreds bond together and expand into this hexagonal form. The entire process is carried out by hand, using low-tech tools like a pedal-operated grinder, using as little energy as possible.

Fractured Furniture Made of Waste by Pentatonic + Snarkitecture

Furniture company Pentatonic collaborated with Snarkitecture, a New York City design studio known for its clever minimalism, to produce the ‘Fractured’ duo of a modular bench and table made from recycled post-consumer waste. Each bench consists of 120 items of food packaging, 4 car bumpers, 45 aluminum cans and 240 plastic bottles. Each table is made of 140 food packaging items and coffee cup lids, six car bumpers and 1,290 cans. Both the bench and table pull apart at the center in a jagged line, creating either one large piece of furniture or two smaller ones.

Both pieces are made using Pentatonic’s patented AirTool system, which uses nitrogen-assisted injection moulding to produce lightweight hollow parts in a process similar to the one used to produce complex automobile components.

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Zero Waste Land 13 Design Projects Making Smart Use Of Reclaimed Materials

Assembling furniture DIY-style, without the skills, tools or fasteners used to produce conventional joints, becomes remarkably easy with shrink-wrapped pieces of discarded plastic bottles. While joinery is certainly an art – especially the complex forms found in Japanese furniture making – traditional methods aren’t necessarily accessible to anyone. This new project, Joining Bottles, offers a way to assemble functional furniture in minutes with trash and a heat gun.

Created by product designer Micaella Pedros, ‘Joining Bottles’ aims to provide a model for producing useful objects using materials that are affordable and widely available. A pile of junk sitting on a curb suddenly becomes valuable in a new way, even if it’s a seemingly irreparable chair and a bin full of materials headed to the recycling plant.

The individual pieces created for a series show how adaptable the concept can be. Use clear bottles if you want the joints to be unobtrusive, or colored bottles to highlight the ingenuity of the system. Wood waste of all kinds, including fallen branches, is assembled into stools, tables, shelves and other objects.

“The different types of wood and plastic bottles available are dictating the final aspect and composition of the work,” say the creators. “In that sense, a unique conversation is engaged within each piece. It creates more space for randomness and spontaneity, in other words, for human attributes in the creative process.”

What are pallets? And why should anyone care? Is a good question being asked a lot since Pinterest came into popularity. Pallets are used and abused wooden platforms used in conjunction with machines to move heavy loads around warehouses and stores. A surging DIY movement is bringing these pieces of equipment out of obscurity and into people’s homes as popular do it yourself foundations.

(Images via homedit, homedit, decoist)

A classy wood dining table can add a simple, rustic look to decor. A nice indie bird backdrop only accentuates the mood. Everyone loves kitchen islands, and huge (EXPENSIVE) granit counter tops. Why not create a pallet island, skip the granite, and have an awesome conversation starter that costs almost nothing? Pallets are durable. This means they can easily be kept outside on a patio without worry of them falling apart, just like the beautiful patio table pictured above.

(Images via mommyapolis, homedit, arninglaws)

Now these are coffee tables! It doesn’t take an incredible amount of skill to put together a gorgeous pallet table, since the pallets themselves are already put together. Then again, there’s always a way to make something easy… way more difficult. Adding a drawer will create a more unique and complex table with some storage space. If you’d like to stick to the easy road, just stack two pallets and add some pre-made wheels.

(Images via shadesoflight, homedit)

The Victorian style of having library walls covered in rich, old growth forest wood, polished to a sheen and carved into intricate designs is just not that practical any more. Enter the pallet walls pictured above; two walls appointed with the naturally aged and personality-filled wooden slats torn from retired wooden pallets.

(Images via homedit, domesticdoozie, wilsonandpugs)

A little creativity can turn a pallet into the perfect addition to a kitchen. The appeal of real wood is universal. Using wooden slats, one can form a beautiful shelf to hold anything from magazines, to plants, to a fine wine collection.

(Images via brainstorm, homivo, muttonhead)

When green thumbs find themselves with limited space, they have to get creative. With only the slightest modifications, retired pallets can become the perfect vertical greenhouses, as their slats turn into tiered shelving ideal for crawling plants or vegetables.

(Images via inhabitat, iarchive, beyondthepicketfence, recraftmagazine, poetichome)

The possibilities of pallet furniture are endless. A modern atmosphere can be accentuated with a carefully manicured pallet couch, and an outdoor space with an informal air can be made more unique with a simple chair. Making pallet stools is surprisingly easy (and colorful), and a TV stand comes as no surprise for the pallet aficcionado. Even an elegant dresser can be formed out of one of the most mundane products of our “better in bulk” culture. Pallet reuse is definitely great for the environment, and great for home design.

Do you ever get sick of people telling you to recycle? Geeky and green, these furniture designers prove recycling can be a lot more interesting than stuffing cans, bottles and cardboard into the proper containers. A ‘bathtub couch’ and ‘shopping cart chair’ may not be your cup of tea but there is something for everyone in this adaptive reuse collection. Who knows, you might even be inspired to find new uses for old stuff around the house after seeing some of these bizarre recycled furniture designs.

The Castor Canadensis design collective has a solution for folks who aren’t sure what to do with old fluorescent light tubes: use them as light fixtures! While the design is not overly complex it is rather elegant in its simplicity. Also, the fixtures are great for diffusing the light and work remarkably well to illuminate an interior living or dining space.

While not exactly ergonomic the adaption of a shopping cart into a chair seems rather reasonable once you see the result: a detailed and structurally-sound seat that bends and gives slightly where needed but also provides a good deal of support and a place to rest one’s arms. Still, these and other shopping cart chairs might be better suited to a BBQ setting than to a formal dining set.

Old sports equipment has a way of accumulating. Some things we outgrow, some things we ‘replace’ only to find the originals later behind some pile in the garage. Instead of discarding all of that stuff why not find a clever way to reuse it? Maybe the skateboard table or baseball bat chair aren’t your style but perhaps you know a sports fan in need of a sporty recycled furniture birthday present.

Not every piece of ‘recycled furniture’ has to be fancy. These crushed-can furniture pieces are extremely simple in theory but quite colorful in practice. They aren’t suited for every interior design scheme but they are robust and would work great for outdoor furniture in a rugged environment. After all, would anyone really notice the rust on these?

If you’ve ever remodeled a bathroom you know just how big and awkward old bathtubs can be and getting one out of the house to be recycled or scrapped is no easy task. With a few simple modifications the designers over at Reestore have found a way to deal with these clunky relics. Whether the solution is a potentially romantic love seat or an entirely kitch creation is, of course, in the eye of the beholder.

A dishwasher drum seems an unlikely candidate for reuse until you see this recycled dishwasher drum table in action. Once transformed, this odd object is surprisingly suited to its new roll as the base of a simple cylindrical side table. The perforations in the site create interesting lighting patters and the hollow center makes this a light and versatile addition to any home.

Once you smash and bend that bike wheel enough it has nowhere to go but the dumpster, right? Wrong if you’re Andrew Gregg who distorts these seemingly broken pieces even further in the pursuit of a higher goal. The results clearly show the objects’ origins but are nonetheless original, dynamic, eye-catching and even useful compositions.

As everything related to computers gets smaller fewer and fewer people need their old CDs, particularly the burned copies of things that are somewhere on hard drive or a iPhone anyway. Simple reuses for these included coasters and gaudy dangling decorations of course, but the chair above is a pretty compact way to reuse loads of them all at once. That being said, one has to wonder whether this CD chair could possibly be comfortable.

Not every piece of old clothing is fit for the Salvation Army. Some things are too full of holes or, well, let’s face it, too embarrassingly outdated for you to subject even a total stranger to. With this simple and material-light clothing container furniture you can simply stuff your old clothes (ideally after one last wash of course) into a new shape and use as plush and padded furniture.

Newspaper has to be one of the most ubiquitous recyclables on the planet and processing newspapers into reusable materials is itself energy-consuming. Instead, people with the time and inclination could take a hint from the above design: folding, wrapping and weaving newspaper can create surprisingly strong, naturally variegated and colorful recycled newspaper baskets.

Cleaning out the drawers always seems to turn up a surprising number of throwaway pens. By the time we get to these many are dried out or otherwise dysfunctional. Up close it may look tacky but from a distance this disposable pen chandelier has some grace to it. Plus if you ever needed a pen you’d at least know where to find one.

Retro is great but for most of us the faked retro items at the local hipster shop are just a bit too contrived. Lamponi Lamps is the real deal: they use vintage appliances and automobile parts to create elaborate and remarkably elegant lamps. There is a kind of retrofuturism at work here with an authenticity rarely found in faux-historical interior furnishings. There are some more great green furniture items and unusually cool recycling projects at Inhabitat and Ecoble as well as some neat recycled art over at CultCase.