Product, Service & Design Innovation
Startup Upcycling Plastic Bottles into Construction Tiles

Humanity has a major math problem: Its population is growing, global demand for new products is swelling and the waste is mounting — all while natural resources and space remain constant. I’m no math wiz, but it seems like this isn’t the most sustainable of equations.

Rather than working to balance each variable of the equation, many are working to rewrite it altogether by eliminating the very concept of “waste” through circular economic thinking. This involves recycling, but also taking it a step further, to upcycling.

Upcycling is a process that can be repeated in perpetuity of returning materials back to a pliable, usable form without degrading their latent value — moving resources back up the supply chain.

This isn’t a new concept — some of the best examples of modern-day upcycling come from the 1930s and '40s when families had few economic or material resources. Forced to be thrifty, they reused nearly everything, repurposing items over and over until they were no longer useful. Feed sacks, for example, became dresses or old doors became the new dining room table.

Today, upcycling is being taken to the next level to rethink waste on an economy-wide scale. The Center for Regenerative Design and Collaboration (CRDC), is a Costa Rica-based company that understands a proactive and integrated approach must to be taken in order to harmonize a growing population’s need with the resulting pressures they put on the environment. The company claims it’s important that “we rethink our past and continue to reinvent our future with the management and recovery process of plastic waste as a resource in a growing circular economy.”

The organization has developed a process of Waste Discount Design (WDD), which represents a new business model in the waste management and recycling arena. The concept contemplates that the waste stream of one industry or product intentionally transforms into the supply stream of the next.

“The idea originated from a beach clean up program when some young students lined up some 2 liter bottles on the beach and flattened them all to compress them so more would fit into our collection bag,” Donald Thomson, founder and CEO of CRDC, told Sustainable Brands. “The way the sun reflects off of them, they looked just like a course of high-end slate tiles; the idea that we could design our waste stream from one industry to become the remanufactured value stream of another was born at that moment.”

This puts added value on the waste stream but conversely radically reduces the costs on the supply stream. WDD works well when the initial product is transitory in nature such as packaging and converts to a permanent use product such as a quality building material.

“It is a circular business model that contemplates designing two products from one — the temporary input side, our bottle, that creates an enriched waste stream which converts to an appreciate permanent output, our tile,” Thompson said.

Using CRDC’s product as a working example, other companies should be able to apply the WDD process to provide the economic rationale to further pursue zero-waste practices. The environmental benefit of WDD is that there is almost zero energy needed to convert the waste product into the finished supply stream.

CRDC produces a tile for buildings made out of reclaimed plastic bottles.

“Our bottle to tile may be the very first example of what we coined waste discount design; we are currently working on other packaging material right now to accomplish the same,” Thomson said.

And all of this is done in a more affordable way than sourcing virgin materials.

“The enrich material that will be used as a material output essentially comes back at the discounted price of waste therefore costs are lowered and competitiveness increased,” he said.

CRDC is a People’s Choice finalist in the The Circulars 2016, a circular economy award program.