“Upcycling” sounds like one of those words coined by Faith Popcorn to make recycling sound twee. That’s actually not too far off; the first recorded usage of the term was by Reiner Pilz in 1994, complaining that re-purposed industrial by-products were broken up instead of anybody thinking how to use them in their present form. When you melt a bottle down to make a new bottle, that’s recycling. When you roll home a giant wooden utility spool to use for a Bohemian coffee table, that’s “up-cycling.”
Which brings us to one of the most impressive acts of up-cycling ever: a whole festival devoted to the humble pallet. Recently in mid-October, Sculpture Park in Denver, Colorado, hosted “Palletfest,” with pallets up-cycled into sculptures, structures, obstacle courses, and a maze. It’s one of those ideas that only look obvious after somebody else has thought of it.
Pallets, in the wild, are big wooden racks that shipments are hauled around on. They travel from warehouse to truck to warehouse via forklift well, and they’re built sturdy and durable so they don’t collapse and spill 20,000 gallons of fabric softener all over somebody. After they’re retired, they basically become giant Legos: You can stack them, rack them, nail them together into a clubhouse, or build a playground for people who are old enough to handle the occasional splinter.
The home site of this burgeoning movement (and we’re doing our best to burgeon it some more here) is at Palletfest, where they not only exhibit their festival, but preach the idealism of up-cycling. The ‘about’ page promises “a whole new world of art and decor” when you undertake to up-cycle pallets into home furnishings. At first that seems like a daunting task, because it’s hard to make a pallet look like anything else. But if you add some upholstery, you see that it really wasn’t a pallet at all – it was a frame for a bed or couch all along.
As the page quote has it: “I don’t think outside the box; I think of what I can do with the box.” Since U.S. companies currently throw away as much as four billion board-feet of pallet wood every year, this is a serious waste gap that we could close with so little effort. Properly up-cycled, there’s no reason we couldn’t build a pallet-shanty home for every homeless person in the country, and insulate and waterproof them all with used bubble-wrap, too.
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