Awesome Recycling

More and more, manufacturers are thinking about ways to reuse and recycle their products once their useful life is over. But mannequins are made from fiberglass, which makes them difficult to recycle. Tom Scott visited Mannakin, a UK outfit who refurbishes and reuse these figures instead of letting them clog up landfills.

We throw out a whole lot of plastic, and very little of it gets recycled. Brothers Make shows us how they used ordinary kitchen appliances to melt milk bottle caps and other plastic bits to create a colorful and functional cutting board. They say the HDPE plastic they used is food-safe.

Woby Design shows off another unique build he made from recycled skateboard decks. By arranging the wood pieces in order of color, he was able to create a sweet rainbow design across its seat and up its legs. The build starts around the 4:30 mark in the video.

Karambits are known for their distinctive claw shape. Metalsmith Koss took advantage of the circular shape of a miniature saw blade and transformed it into a tiny, razor-sharp version of the unusual Indonesian weapon.

Leaf springs from cars and trucks might not offer the best ride quality, but they make some pretty awesome weapons when recycled by a skilled bladesmith. Faraway Forge crafted a beautiful Japanese tanto-style knife from one such rusty piece of metal. We love how he kept the pitted texture as part of the finished piece.

Artist Blake McFarland previously showed off his sculpting skills by making a lion and a tiger out of tires. This time, he created an awesome-looking octopus by creating a steel, foam, and fiberglass form, then wrapping it in old bike tires. The glass eyes by artist Becca Barnet help bring it to life.

After turning himself into an ostrich, Bobby Duke took a rusty railroad spike and transformed it into an mini fighting knife inspired by a design by Kyle Royer. Towards the end of the video, the normally ebullient Duke opens up about his struggles with depression, reminding us that mental health issues can affect anyone.

After seeing Sideshow’s Alien King Maquette, artist Cao Shengge was inspired to make his own version of the terrifying (but non-canon) creature. After making a clay miniature, he got to work building the life-size monster from steel, bicycle innertubes, and over 200 recycled tires.

Ben Paik of Woby Designs previously showed us how he turns old skateboard decks into usable lumber. Now the builder has gone completely meta by building colorful new skateboard decks out of wood gathered from 100 broken decks. That custom deck tape heater is a clever hack.

Costume jewelry pieces are sometimes made out of glass, but those fakes are usually made by casting molten glass. In this video, an artist from China shows us how they make imitation sapphires and emeralds from broken bottles, reshaping and faceting the shattered bits using a rotary tool.

Have some old closet doors lying around? Guitar builder Tim Sway shows us how he took the thin wood used to make hollow-core doors and used it to build a totally serviceable acoustic guitar. He laminated together strips from the edges of the door with epoxy to create the guitar’s neck and used the main panels for its body.

Blacksmith Black Beard Projects shows off a really sweet build – a replica of a Viking-style bearded hatchet. Its sweeping axe head started off life as a section of a railroad track, and its handle was hand-carved from elm wood. Also, we’re suckers for anything with a Damascus pattern.

YouTuber Mr. Inventor shows us how he made a unique axe-shaped tool by bending, cutting, and welding together lengths of rusty old steel rebar. It might not be the most practical tool, but it would make a neat decorative piece.

While walking along the riverfront in Cologne, Germany, maker Laura Kampf spotted a park bench that was in really bad shape. Rather than ignore it, she headed back to her shop and fabricated a new seat using scrap pallet wood from her neighbor’s trash. We love Laura’s idea of “guerilla making” to improve public spaces.

WorksByaHurst asks his followers to send in random items for him to build things from. When he received a box full of old bicycle parts, the idea that struck him was to turn the chains into the tentacles and body of an octopus. While he was working on it, all we could think of was those creepy Sentinels from The Matrix.

We always enjoy watching craftspeople turn objects intended for one thing into something entirely different. In this clip from My Mechanics, offers up one off the more impressive transformations we’ve seen, reworking an ordinary stainless steel bolt and a brass rod into a working combination lock.

If you want a real Bugatti Chiron, you’re looking at about $3 million bucks. Or if you’re handy with cutting metal and welding, you could make one out of old car parts. CB Media visited Thailand’s Ban Hun Lek for a look at an incredible Chiron replica parked between an army of junkyard mechs and monsters.

If you look around, you can find a bargain-basement drum kit for about $200. But if even that’s not in your budget, you could do what Deden Noy did, and make your own drums from plastic buckets, water bottles, scrap metal, and packing tape. Check out his YouTube channel for more performances.

Wheel rims from a car seem like an odd material for building a wood-burning stove, but that’s exactly what André Göbel of Create Custom Designs did, a set of old steel rims to provide the structure for a cylindrical stove inspired by Bullerjan stoves, which use bent pipes to circulate cold air from the bottom and out of its top.

The UN Environment Programme introduces us to Nzambi Matee, a materials engineer based in Kenya, whose business Gjenge Makers creates low-cost construction materials. By heating and compressing waste plastic and sand, they form durable blocks which weigh half that of traditional clay bricks.

Inspired by the eponymous piece of furniture in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Epic UpCycling set about the task of building his own wardrobe, only this one is made entirely out of recycled timber gathered from old shipping pallets. He even managed to reuse the rusty old nails. Now how to get to Narnia?

Rather than melting down and reforging the metal from an old sawblade, metalsmith Hassan “Habu” Abu-Izmero wanted to see if he could just cut, grind, and polish the old metal into a new weapon. The transformation from the rusty old blade into machete is impressive. The paracord-wrapped handle looks great too.

Scandinavian outfitter Fjällräven updates its classic Kånken Daypack with a plant-based fabric made from sustainably-grown spruce and pine trees. It’s still the same simple pack as always, with handles for toting, and a spacious main compartment. It drops 8.2021. Their recycled plastic and wool variants are also eco-friendly.