Upcyling for beginners

Our trash has become a big topic of late, with China refusing to take our recycling, plastic pollution choking our oceans, and global warming rising to alarming levels. Not making trash is the best way to resolve all of these problems, but that's not realistic the way society functions. One of the best things you can do, is to turn your trash into treasure through upcycling.

With a little ingenuity you can turn toilet paper into seedling pots or bird feeders, t-shirts into teddy bears, and even plastic bottles into a green house. It's a great way to help keep trash out of landfills, and keep using things as long as possible. Here are a couple quick and easy ways you can transform trash into useful parts of the home.

Bread clips into cord tags

Have you ever dug around your desk and unplugged 3 different things before finally figuring out which was the right plug? A quick way to resolve this is to take your bread clips, label them with “lamp” or “Computer” and clip them to the correct cord. From now on you'll be able to get it right the first time, and you'll have kept a little more plastic out of landfill.

Turn a tissue box into bag storage

If you like to save single use plastic bags to reuse again as trash bags, a tissue box is a great way to keep it organized and stop the giant bag of bags under the sink from getting any bigger. If you've moved beyond single use grocery bags, tightly rolled reusable grocery bags can also stack in them.

 Lots of different things can be upcycled, and turned into amazing and beautiful products you actually want to have. Before you throw something away, take a closer look at it—you never know what you might able to do with it.