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

A stunning blend of old and new, this lovely oceanfront home is intertwined with remnants of an industrial ruin; the two are combined while differentiating existing from added architecture.

The house seems to grow out of the deserted walls of the former structure, resting above and pushing beyond them. Designed by Razvan Barsan + Partners of Romania, the program of this seaside California home consists of a series of residential buildings and outdoor decks leading out to a private island.

Local materials like wood, reed and bamboo along with modern lines and copious amounts of glass set the additions apart from the existing remains of both functional and ornate masonry.

Miscellaneous metal cylinders and barrels were also left, the primary home space floating above them on the shore.

The island, bridged by a minimal walkway, features trees, seating and a fire pit for gatherings, all balanced against the secondary structure between it and the mainland..

A 400-year-old ceramics studio in Japan has completely remodeled their store with a most remarkable addition: a walkable surface constructed from a stack of tens of thousands of scrapped pieces of crockery.

Yusuke Seki (photos by Takumi Ota) collected plates, saucers, bowls and cups for this creative endeavor, all to create a display platform for Maruhiro Ceramics in Hasami, Nagasaki.

To facilitate a more intimate experience, a pair of stairs is placed by the display platform, allowing visitors to walk up and peruse wares, all while enjoying a sense of wonder from the layers of history right beneath their feet.

Traditionally, flawed ceramics are simply thrown into dedicated landfills, while this rethought application brings pieces of history back up to the surface.

Since the discards are eliminated before the coloring and glazing process, there is an aesthetic consistency to the materials reused in this creative context.

Individually fragile, the tableware was turned into modular bricks by being filled with concrete, but their individual shapes and sizes still made this a daunting endeavor to actually deploy. Still, the result is compelling and interactive – not so much of a crackpot idea after all, as it turns out.

Traditionally legal in Peru, many citizens nonetheless find cockfights a morbid and gruesome affair and are thus celebrating the transformation of this sunken coliseum into a meditative and memorial public green space.

Paths, greenery and water features were added in part to lend the sensibilities of monuments and memorials to the place, commemorating the animals who suffered and died within the ring.

Remade by 2.8x Architects, this coliseum in Lima, Peru, has many preserved and reused elements, including large stones and cast concrete either left in place or redeployed on the property with new purposes in mind.

Since cockfighting has been historically seen a sport in the region (and heavily bet upon), bird fighting pits (aka “cockpits”) in the country have been correspondingly prominent and well-constructed places, not the seedy sideshows one may imagine in locations where it is illegal. The driving idea was to reflect the history of the space in the form of preserved ruins while also providing a new experience in this unusually enclosed, semi-subterranean space.

One can still imagine the historical horrors that took place before the conversion – armed with spurs for battle, cocks set about slashing and scraping one another, often resulting in the death of one or both combatants. At the same time, an abstracted yin-and-yang symbol at the center of the sunken circle and lush vegetation on all sides (filling the former stands and seats) conjure fresh and more optimistic feelings and associations among neighbors and visitors.

From the designers: “So the curved lines of the terraces contemplated in the project go on top of the remaining concrete stands, and the levels of these terraces try to maintain the original levels of some of the stands. This way the proportions of the coliseum continue. In the same way, the central space of the garden keeps the same dimensions and characteristics of the arena where the birds used to fight. The project has as background the hills of the residential area. It is because of the surroundings where the project is located, with hills all around, that we chose irregular “talamolle” stone as the main building material.”

“We also used terrazzo, concrete, and green painted iron for some details like the fountain, the circular bench, the wire net, and the ramp at the entry among others. To reinforce the idea of a memorial garden and a place suitable for meditation, elements such as water, a circular ramp all around, and a curved path of stone crossing the central space were included. The path together with the central circular garden form the ying yang, that is the equilibrium center of the whole space. At night the diffused illumination has an important role too.”

Converting almost anything you find into a household furnishing, from discarded doors and shelf boxes to dart boards, these clip-on supports can be added or removed in seconds.

Initially experimenting with cards, clips and coat hangers, a pair of Spanish design students in Barcelona, Maria Roca and Erika Biarnes (together: Be-Elastic), developed this system to be elegant, efficient, strong and flexible, combining slim steel supports with straightforward usability.

The real challenge was to make something robust that could also be easily converted on demand. While other clamp-based furniture systems exist, this solution represents a more versatile and expressive aesthetic and a much faster method of assembly and disassembly.

A set of four legs can support a few hundred pounds, making surface selection a more likely weight limitation than the capacity of the supports. As few as two units, however, can create a working piece of furniture, like a side or television table leaning against the wall. The units come in 16 color combinations (4 colors of cable and 4 colors of steel).

The clamps can be attached to essentially anything less than a few inches thick, including recycled objects of various shapes and sizes: “SNAP is designed to fit all shapes and sizes: triangular, rectangular or irregular boards. You can also place the SNAPs wherever you like in corners, on the sides in a disorderly way, or wherever you’d like! It’s up to you.”