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.

Using scraps from start to finish, this shrink-wrap approach to furniture is not only greener but faster and leaner, requiring less by way of specialized skills or tools and allowing people to build easier do-it-yourself objects. A project of Micaella Pedros for the Royal College of Art, the Joining Bottles project uses heat to shrink plastic around wood joints, collected from around London, locking them together.

“The idea is about taking a plastic bottle, cutting it, and then putting it around two pieces of wood., Pedros explains. “Then I heat it so it shrinks and creates a joint.” The key part of the process is the notching of the wood, which gives the plastic a way to grip the disparate pieces and lock them firmly into place.

Traditionally, joinery is the most complex, time-consuming and often high-tech part of the furniture-making process, making this innovative approach a welcome alternative for those without the time and resources to spend months building custom pieces.

On the flip side, cutting and notching tools are commonplace and able to be improvised, meaning: a would-be Joining Bottles-type builder would not need access to a sophisticated wood shop. Scissors, a hair dryer or other heating element and simple carving tools will suffice. They key is in making the connections follow common sense: flat-to-flat helps, and complex angles may fail.

This is not about marketing a new line of garbage chic furniture, but about sharing knowledge about easier ways for ordinary people to upcycle everyday trash. “The core idea of the project is not to sell the products I’m building but more about sharing the principle and sharing the technique.” She is running workshops to show people how to follow her lead, enabling them to walk in with junk and walk out with furniture.

The idea hinges on the global similarity of plastic bottles amid a sea of different types of wood. Basically, anyone in any place can find the same plastics and use them to connect whatever woods are locally available. The aesthetic results are up to the end user (or maker): there are many ways one could refine the look and feel of this general design approach.

The latest in a long line of city-centric upcycling projects, this modular couch turns the ultimate in untouchable urban infrastructure into a chic industrial work of furniture.

Carlo Sampietro created the Cloche Sofa after seeing a section of sewage pipe abandoned by a construction site, its spot being fit for replacement with a new set of tubes.

He then fitted the ends with stabilizing structural circles and plasma-cut sections for seats, welding them back into place, hinging them and creating two locked positions (open and closed). Various configurations can be achieved by opening and closing sections to create a pair of chairs, a love seat or a full sofa.

This is far from the first time that Sampietro has reworked urban elements into new forms – his Cloche Chairs turned safety barrels from “symbols of caution into objects of comfort.”

Some of his pieces draw on the visual language of familiar street objects, but interpret them in new ways, like this police barrier table constructed from walnut, steel, resin and using LEDs (which light up through its lettering below).

More about the sofa from the artist: “It represents landscape evolution that dismantles established structural standards and elements of construction materials, and repurposes a found material into sophisticated design, reshaping a common object into a meaningful amalgam. This piece harnesses objects that outlived their original uses, were discarded, reclaimed and renovated. The evolution of this landscape design could be achieved by taking in consideration other material such as concrete, stainless steel, wood or marble, all cylindrical forms present in existing construction materials or natural environment. The tube shape is accented by LED side panels and the conic footing. This renders the object’s hybrid functionality almost invisible, unnoticeable at the first glance.”

In a sleepy suburb of Sydney, Australia, long since taken over by mainly-one-story houses, sat a disused metal-sided shed. An ad hod affair, it was a rare leftover of what was once an industrial neighborhood, destined for demolition but instead converted into a strange new home.

The newly-reconstituted building dubbed ‘Tinshed’  by Raffaello Rosselli (images by Mark Syke) is made from the metal of the old abandonment. It is still pockmarked, with a haphazard surface that slips between gray, green, white and red – its panels overlapping in odd and seemingly chaotic patchwork patterns. Now, however, it these frame a few more oddities, like windows for the first time in the site’s life.

Inside, the building has immaculate flat white walls and crisp curved surfaces, reflecting its fresh purpose as a studio (on the first floor) dwelling and office space (on the second level). The juxtaposition of interior and exterior is fitting, as the entire structure is itself a strange addition to its surroundings.

As you may recall (and please, forgive the pun), pay phones used to be ubiquitous – in many places they remain a physical presence, but without a use. As Banksy‘s work (above) points out, their primary purpose is arguably quite dead – but, on the upside, that leaves room for all kinds of radical rebirths.

Around the world, old phone booths are also becoming high-tech data hubs. Consider New York City, which has just unrolled a pilot program to turn 250 old phone booths into information centers, providing basic maps, directions and directories to tourists, but also up-to-the-minute emergency information and safety alerts in case of serious storms or other natural disasters.

Local architect John Locke has come up with another, lower-tech, even-easier reuse project for some of the 10,000+ remaining unused public phones on the streets of Manhattan – easily-fabricated micro-libraries that can be slotted into existing boxes, taking advantage of their robust framework and shelter. No fasteners needed for this efficient and inexepensive flat-pack solution.

Across the pond, iconic red-box phone booths of England may be even more well-suited to this particular kind of conversion, being closeable and thus, while not 100% weatherproof, still more completely sealed from the elements. The result is one of “the country’s smallest lending libraries – stocking 100 books. Villagers from Westbury-sub-Mendip in Somerset can use the library around the clock, selecting books, DVDs and CDs. Users simply stock it with a book they have read, swapping it for one they have not.”

Turning back toward the high-tech, Telekom Austria is tackling over ten thousand disused phone booths, turning them into recharging stations for the nation’s estimated growth toward over a half-million electric vehicles in the next decade. But enough about functional conversions – what about the artistic side? See below for homeless shelters, aquariums, even outhouses made of old phone booths.

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Retro Redial 8 Creative Phone Booth Conversion Projects