Using only discarded materials found within a one block radius of their office, Antoine Morris and David Long built “The Mobile Office” – a self contained work/live environment.

Kris Kuksi weaves together strange looking pieces out of old toys, statues, mechanical parts and other discarded detritus.

University of the Arts in Philly students Jin Hong, Sebastian Brauer, Ji In Sun, and Jackie Starker have designed a series of “durable, watertight, and wind-resistant garments that are lightweight enough for everyday wear yet easily convertible into tents or sleeping bags that can brave the elements.”

Challenging the notion that Christmas gift-giving has to be about spending lots of money, and buying the latest hot item, Folksy and Sue Ryder Careare running a competition called Upcycle Christmas.

The Fixers are a Brooklyn based group that gets together once a week to repair and re-purpose all kinds of broken things – shoes, radios, lamps, clocks – anything is game.

The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics will be presenting beautiful upcycled medals to its winners next year.

In preparation for the NYC Marathon, outdoor clothing company Icebreaker has set up a live seamstress in the window of Paragon Sports in NYC to convert old synthetic running t-shirts into shoe bags for free.

Carlo Ratti, from the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT has initiated a project to track where trash goes when we throw it “away”.

Jack Bresnahan created a set of nine biodegradable plastic lids that turn old tin cans into different kinds of household containers.

Target, will be transforming vinyl from their Times Square billboard into 1,600 limited edition bags designed by Anna Sui.

You’ve got to hand it to American Apparel- they’re always finding new ways to make tired cotton and spandex duds into something exciting and marketable. In perhaps it’s more extreme permutation, American Apparel will now be bypassing design and production altogether and opting to sell the Bag-O-Scraps, which the AA website describes as :
“collected cuttings from some of your favorite fun fabrics from around the American Apparel factory to make one-of-a-kind bags of scrap fabrics. Use them for all sorts of arts and crafts. Make clever jewelry, accessories, a card for your grandma or a colorful hanging sculpture for your [...]

Designer Joey Roth arrived at the Javits center for the NY Gift Fair last week with some of his products, a Japanese hand saw, and a sketchbook. While other vendors bought crates and pallets full of stuff for their booth displays, Joey instead decided to go about constructing his booth at the show in a unique manner – by using the scraps from the other booths . PSFK tagged along with Joey as he built his booth and we documented the process and result. We put together a short video with Joey explaining the inspiration and unique construction process he [...]

As ugly as most advertising billboards are, what’s even uglier is that most of them are made out of non-biodegradable vinyl, and that over three million billboards’ worth (that’s 10,000 tons) get thrown into landfills every year. TerraCycle and Yakpak, who will be turning discarded vinyl into durable backpacks and messenger bags. The material happens to lend itself exceptionally well to tough conditions—it was used for the outdoors, after all—and accordingly the bags come with a lifetime warranty. Yakpak is going to great lengths to ensure the manufacture of the bags is ethically sound—they own their own factory in El [...]

It’s always a quandary when it comes to outdated technology. Do you keep using it till it falls apart? Do you recycle it, wait till it comes back in style?
Another option is to repurpose the gadget in question, giving it a new life as something else. An application for the iPhone, named Serversman, can do just that with any spare phones you may have lying around.
This interesting app transforms iPhones into a mini web server, network storage facility, or file viewer. It’s downloadable here. and watch the video below for a demonstration.

[via DVICE]

Ghana-born artist El Anatsui’s works have been centered around the use of many different kinds of found materials which join together to form pieces that address topics such as consumerism, globalization, waste, and post-colonialism in Africa.

The metal fragments that act as the base of his sculptures: aluminum wrappings from the tops of bottles in local distilleries, rusty metal graters, used printing plates, are gathered locally in Nsukka, Nigeria, where Anatsui has called home for 28 years.
The National Museum for African Art site has a gallery of his works, along with his commentary on selected pieces. For more of an [...]