Recycled vs Upcycled: Choosing Better Promo Gear

If you've spent time in sustainable and green circles recently, you've likely heard terms like recycled and upcycled tossed around fairly frequently. Sometimes, you might even think they're being used interchangeably.

It's important to know, though, that there is a difference between them, and it's pretty significant too. Knowing that difference, and picking between the options for things like your brand's promo gear, can be extremely important for the image and impact you want to have.

The Similarities Between Upcycling and Recycling

Both upcycling and recycling are parts of the same overall concept: taking products that have outlived their normal usefulness and repurposing them into something new.

The goal of both kinds of programs is to prevent some portion of those items from reaching landfills and polluting the water and land of our planet. With microplastics being found in the deepest and most secluded places on the planet, it's more important than ever to try to dial back on those sources of potential contamination and damage.

Together, both methods also put pressure on the other side of the product life cycle. When people choose to purchase products made from recycled or upcycled materials, they're not purchasing new products, so that drives down demand for new production.

How Recycling Works

Recycling is as you've traditionally known it: taking a category of material as it's to be discarded, and repurposing it somehow to make something new.

• Newspaper can be shredded, re-pulped, bleached (or not), and pressed back into new, fresh paper or cardboard products.
• Glass can be broken apart, melted down, and re-formed into new glass items.
• Metal can be melted down, purified, and repurposed into new metal items.
• Some forms of plastic can be melted, spun out, and turned into new fibers. Others can be pressed into new shapes.

The key is that recycling generally involves some kind of industrial process, often with a chemical form of deconstruction. The material is broken down as completely as possible, and reconstituted in a new form.

This is why some materials, like certain plastics, can't be recycled: the chemical processes necessary to do it don't work or aren't financially viable. Plastic that burns rather than melting, plastic that can't be extruded into new shapes, and that kind of thing. It's why metal and glass are much more easily and readily recycled.

How Upcycling Works

Upcycling is a little different. With upcycling, you're taking items at the end of their lifespan and repurposing them in some way to give them new life.

• Old wooden pallets are repurposed into furniture.
• Old clothing is broken down and sewn into new forms, like tote bags.
• Old metal is cut and welded and incorporated into art pieces and the like.
• Old glass is broken apart and reassembled into mosaics.

Critically, there's no industrial transformation or chemical change happening. Maybe some old fabric is dyed to give it new life, or old paper is printed with new designs, but plastic isn't melted down and glass isn't reconstituted.

Instead, upcycling is all about the individuality and history of items. By definition, it tends to be relatively small-scale, as much reserved for single art pieces and unique items as for something broader for distribution. It celebrates the materials it uses, rather than hides them.

Comparing Upcycling and Recycling

Now let's look at each process and how they're different across a variety of factors you might be concerned with when picking it for your products.

Consistency in Output

One of the biggest differences between recycled products and upcycled products is in the uniqueness and consistency of the finished product.

With recycled products, a lot of different base materials are mixed and merged to create a more homogeneous whole, which is then used to produce the finished product. Recycled paper products might start out as a ton of different kinds of paper, but the output at the end of the process is uniform. Products made from recycled materials might have small flaws or defects, or a less firmly consistent overall appearance due to a lack of bleaching or other chemical treatments, but overall, it's uniform.

Upcycling, on the other hand, is much more individualized. While the finished products might all be the same basic item – tote bags, for example – the exact designs, patterns, and signs of the previous item's life will vary. Totes made of upcycled denim might have different wear patterns, different colors, different stitching, and more, even if the finished tote is uniform in size, shape, and design.

This is one of the biggest factors to consider when you're thinking of using either recycled or upcycled items for your promotional gear. Recycled gives you a more overall uniform, cleaner, and consistent appearance, especially across a large number of the same item. Upcycled items might not be available in bulk, might not be consistent, or might be varied in appearance and quality.

That's not necessarily bad, to be clear. A rock band upcycling old stage banners as tote bags gives each buyer a unique, limited-edition piece of their history, and it's not a downside that there's no consistency between them.

Environmental Impact

The goal of both upcycling and recycling is to reduce the amount of a given item reaching landfills, and put some downward pressure on excess manufacturing, to balance out the scales.

Recycling can keep a significant amount of material out of landfills, but it's not without its own environmental impact. Retaining, transporting, sorting, cleaning, and handling those to-be-recycled items is time, labor, and energy-intensive. It may also be less effective than could be hoped, as contaminated items and unsuitable items still end up needing to be disposed of, cutting into the efficiency of the recycling process.

Recycling can also involve chemical and industrial processes to create its finished product. Whether it's applying chemicals to bleach and break down paper products, to the head generated to melt metal or glass, it can consume energy and leave behind byproducts that themselves can be damaging.

Different kinds of products and different kinds of recycling can have different levels of impact, positive or negative. It's even more granular when you consider that different recycling facilities across the country, let alone in other countries, have different methods and levels of efficiency.

Upcycling doesn't have much of that impact. Large-scale upcycling still has gathering and transportation costs associated with it, but all of the more industrial-scale sorting is absent. On the flip side, it tends to be even more labor-intensive, because each individual product is more likely to be hand-made and require unique attention, and can't just be tossed into a machine to await a finished product.

Upcycling does also help to keep products out of landfills, though on a smaller scale than recycling. It's also generally less common, so there has been less investment in it, less awareness of it, and less buy-in, which contributes to it remaining smaller in scope.

As part of an overall revamping of the supply chain, both have a role; as a choice for your brand to invest in, picking one or the other may be more relevant.

Suitability for Promotional Gear

When you're considering taking advantage of either recycling or upcycling for your promotional gear, you have to consider the pros and cons of both kinds of processes and the products they create.

Recycling produces more consistent, uniform, and generally usable items. For example, if you wanted promotional stationery like calendars, planners, or notebooks, using recycled paper for it isn't much more difficult than using virgin paper. Apparel made of recycled materials is a little harder, but the fashion industry has been under fire for so long that they've made great strides in fabric recycling in recent years, so it's growing more and more prominent.

Upcycling tends to be more individualized and often less useful in a promotional sense. A lot of upcycling falls into the categories of DIY arts and crafts, quirky and unique fashion, and off-beat reuse of materials. Upcycled products don't often lend themselves as well to being promotional items.

The exception is, as in the band example above, if the upcycled materials themselves hold some significance for your brand. If your business has a lot of older promotional materials using an old logo, for example, those could be upcycled into retro-chic new products to leverage nostalgia from long-time customers.

Your choice will largely come down to the intentionality behind the products you create, and the overall aesthetic your brand aims for. If you're more on the corporate side and uniformity (and availability) is important, recycling is more likely for you. If you're a smaller-scale brand where small-batch, unique, and quirky items win the day, go with upcycling.

Potential Downsides and Drawbacks

Both recycling and upcycling have potential drawbacks that can be worth considering.

With recycling, one of the biggest issues is that it's difficult, resource-intensive, and expensive. There are a lot of recycling programs that are not financially efficient to run, or that have a much lower effective recycling level than the amount of waste they process would imply. Contamination isn't easy to handle, especially not in a clean way, as it often requires chemicals to address.

That's not to say that recycling is ineffective, of course. It's still a net benefit when it's managed properly, and the more investment and encouragement there is in recycling, the better it will get over time.

Upcycling has less of a cost in terms of energy and money, but potentially more in terms of labor and time. It's frequently costly just because of the people and attention that need to be paid to making it work. While the finished products are unique and distinctive, there are only so many that can be made.

There's also a small risk of upcycling being abused. For example, some upcycling companies purchase deadstock from stores at a discount to use that unsold merchandise in upcycled products rather than having it sent to a landfill or returned overseas to a landfill there. Some manufacturers, then, manufacture more products to produce more deadstock, which in many ways is the opposite of the point and purpose of upcycling.

For the most part, as far as a company offering promotional gear is concerned, these aren't likely to be significant drawbacks. They're systemic and institutional problems, which aren't going to be solved by writing off either process.

Alternatives to Recycling and Upcycling

If your brand wants to promote green business, focus on sustainability, and contribute to an overall circular economy, recycling and upcycling are two ways you can do it. But critically, they aren't the only two ways you can do it.

There are other ways to promote social good through the products you sell or give away, whether it's the items you focus your business on or the promotional gear you have for engaged customers, employees, outreach campaigns, and trade shows.

One option is to focus your efforts on other areas of sustainability, like human rights and a living wage throughout your supply chain. While this has less of a direct impact on the environment, it's better for human rights and the ethical treatment of people throughout your supply lines. You can also focus on options like union labor where relevant.

Another option is to make sure that the raw materials and products you purchase are sustainable in other ways, whether it's working explicitly with Fairtrade International or another ethically-certified supplier.

Even switching from less sustainable base materials like polyester and other plastics to more sustainable options like cotton and responsibly-processed bamboo can go a long way. An office switching to recycled paper isn't better than one cutting out paper entirely, right?

And, of course, you can do all of it. There's no rule that says you can't offer both recycled and upcycled products, either in your store or as promotional items. Likewise, nothing says you can't do that alongside items made of virgin materials, but with ethical sources. The goal isn't to invest fully in any one solution, it's to incorporate as many positive actions as possible, and push towards the future in as many small ways as we can.