A classic mid-century roadside motel in Las Vegas has been turned into a fantastically colorful habitat for a series of huge animals, constructed from waste collected from dumpsters, abandoned factories and scrap yards.

This 10,000-square-foot zoo parody (dubbed ‘Wild Wild Waste’) by artist Bordalo II is his biggest installation to date. It’s designed to make statements about the commodification of animal habitats as well as human waste production and management activities.

“Bordalo is inspired by the rejected, the broken, the wasted, somehow our everyday,” explains the exhibit’s curator. “With the trash we refuse to be responsible for he creates a fantastic installation that is playful and, furthermore that question our relation to waste and our responsibility.”

The animals are simultaneously visible as a whole and a set of parts. A flock of penguins emerges from plastic cubes, car parts morph into a family of pandas, while a whale caught in a fishing net and lion caged in a truck further highlight ideas of confinement.

“We were so humbled to have the opportunity to help host the art of bordalo at life is beautiful this past weekend,” said one of the organizers. “The entire installation’s emotional nature gave us all a little lesson in doing more with less in our work and in our environment.”

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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Ready or not, the 3D-printed future is coming, and the first examples are already arriving in cities around the world in the form of office buildings, small houses, public furniture, public art and self-driving buses. Restaurants that squirt your meals into intricate shapes through a 3D printer will likely proliferate, and before long, this tech revolution is expected to take over all sorts of urban construction processes, like building roads and bridges. 3D printing requires far less labor than other building processes, of course, something that makes a lot of people nervous about the future of jobs. But it’s also cheaper, more sustainable, and results in far more complex, ornamental structures.

Public Furniture: 3D-Printed Benches Made of Trash Bags

‘Print Your City!’ is a new initiative by Rotterdam-based research and design studio ‘The New Raw’ transforming plastic waste into urban furniture with 3D printing. The ‘XXX Bench’ is a double-sided rocking chair seating two to four people who have to use equilibrium to balance the seat. Each one weights about 110 pounds, is made from recycled plastic pellets from municipal plastic waste or flakes from ground recycled products, and is 100% recyclable itself.

Public Art: Giant Sculptural Sundials

3D printing will likely invade urban environments in the form of large-scale public art before we see a whole lot of architecture and infrastructure. This giant sundial taking the form of a flowering fan is one example. Made by design group ‘prescription’ in conjunction with Arup, the geometry of the structure is optimized using specific solar data from any world location to give it a unique form wherever it’s constructed. It’s 3D printed from strong, flexible plastic, and the design is 100% scalable.

Office Buildings: ‘Office of the Future’ in Dubai

Dubai’s ‘Office of the Future’ is the world’s first 3D-printed office building, created layer-by-layer using a special cement mixture in just 17 days at a cost of just $140,000. Only one employee was needed to monitor the printer at any given time, while seven other employees installed the building components onsite along with electricians and specialists. The 3D printer used for the project is pretty remarkable itself, measuring 20 feet high, 120 feet long and 40 feet wide.

Restaurants: ‘Food Ink’ 3D-Printed Meals

While the building itself is not 3D printed, the food inside ‘Food Ink’ is. This pop-up restaurant uses 3D printers to create dishes like pizza, hummus, chocolate mousse and other foods that can be made with printed pastes to create culinary sculptures.The project is “putting to work most innovative technologies, like 3D-printing and augmented reality, in order to elaborate the most exquisite interactive edible experience.” How long will it be before this is a common practice in many restaurants?

Transportation: Autonomous 3D-Printed Bus

This boxy, strange looking bus by Local Motors debuted in Washington D.C. in 2016, giving autonomous rides at the company’s introductory event. The driverless, 3D-printed ‘Olli’ has 12 seats and is powered by IBM Watson’s Internet of Things for Automotive technology, a car-focused cognitive learning platform. “Olli offers a smart, safe and sustainable transportation solution that is long overdue,” says Local Motors. “Olli with Watson acts as our entry into the world of self-driving vehicles, something we’ve been quietly working on with our co-creative community for the past year. We are now ready to accelerate the adoption of this technology and apply it to nearly every vehicle in our current portfolio and those in the very near future.”

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A new pub and brewery building has been constructed from recycled materials in Kamikatsu, a Japanese town famous for its advanced recycling program that sorts waste in 34 categories for optimal reuse.

Designed by Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP, the structure embodies the waste-reducing principles of the community, which manages to remarkable 80% recycling rate.

Prominently, one facade is constructed from windows taken from abandoned houses and doubled up to trap air and improve insulation. This community-facing elevation brings in light but also acts as an icon of sustainability for the town but also a beacon to outsiders highlighting the area’s eco-friendly endeavors.

Their pub (a word derived from ‘public house’) aims to be open and inviting, a place where people can share a drink in large shared spaces.

Patrons sit on upcycled and converted furniture from various sources, walk on surfaces tiled with old factory flooring in spaces wall-papered with old news, all enclosed by facades wrapped in recycled cedar boards.

The business also sells groceries and other household supplies, acting as a commercial hub for the town in various secondary ways.

Made from the corpse of a 1997 BMW 528i salvaged from a junkyard and other recycled parts, this DIY electric car beats the Tesla Model S P100D’s mile range at a tiny fraction of the cost. The Tesla boasts a range of 335 miles per charge, while the ‘Phoenix’ by Eric Lundgren gets 380 miles. Lundgren and his team built the Phoenix in 35 days for just $13,000, and hopes the attention his trash car is getting will encourage carmakers with more cash to do more material recycling.

Founder and CEO of information technology organization ITAP, Lundgren bought the 20-year-old E39 generation BMW 528i and removed most of the interior – including the rear seats, dashboard, center console and trim – in order to save weight (yes, that’s the catch.) He added a 130kWh battery pack that uses cells from EV and laptop batteries to power the car, which takes up most of the space where the backseat would normally be.

To test his creation, Lundgren pitted it against three popular electric vehicles: the Tesla, a Chevy Bolt and a Nissan Leaf. All four competed in a trip across Southern California to see which one would last the longest. The Leaf ran out of juice first after 81 miles, followed by the Model S at 238 miles. The Bolt managed to squeak out 271. The BMW never ran out of range at all – instead, it blew a fuse after 340 miles with 32 percent of its charge left on its battery pack. In a second test, the Phoenix ran directly against the Tesla, getting 382 miles to the 100D’s 315.

Clearly, the fact that so much of its weight has been removed while the Tesla is loaded down with luxury options makes a difference in the result, but so should the fact that Tesla is working with top-quality, brand-new parts. For Lundgren, that’s not really the point.

“Re-use is the purest form of recycling. It creates zero carbon footprint. Re-using parts/components within broken/obsolete electroncis is called ‘hybrid recycling.’ This is a much-needed and often missing part of the recycling ecosystem.”