Problem
Furniture is filling up the landfills; so, something must be done. In fact, furniture is to blame for approximately 9 million tons in landfills. A solution to this problem is upcycling. Good, quality furniture is being thrown away, because it might be considered out of date or the owner got bored. With upcycling, they could have just added a new cover. Upcycling is the solution to clearing up the landfills.
Abstract
For this project, I attempted to see what affects upcycling would have on the environment. I did this by upcycling things around my house and comparing the price it too to make it to what similar products sell for in retail. I also focused on the amount of furniture in landfills, because most furniture ends up there. I found if more people upcycled the Earth would be better because of it.
Analysis
According to epa.com, the landfills are made up of multiple categories. All the categories add up to the total of 251 million tons; meaning, that is how much waste is in the landfills. The highest category being paper with 27%. The lowest, is other with 3%. The range is 24%. Sources of error could be someone did not measure properly or the numbers were rounded to get a cleaner, more approximate number. Interestingly, wood is only at 6%. epa.com has reported that 9.8 million tons of furniture is thrown away each year. So, it is interesting that wood accounts for only 6% of the 251 million tons of trash in landfills.
Conclusion
This graph shows the 251 million tons of waste is made up of in landfills. This shows that a large portion of the materials, like the wood, glass and plastic are upcyclable. Most of theses items should not be in the landfills. If more people were to upcycling this graph would be different and most of the waste would not be produced.
Reflection
Analysis
This bar graph shows the comparison between the amount of money that it took to make each project in comparison to the retail price of similar products. The low for retail prices is $20 and is for the jar. The highest price for the retail is $195 for the end table. The lowest price for upcycling, and also the lowest price altogether is $0. The highest price for upcycling is $30. The range for all the data is 195. In every case, the retail price is much higher than than the upcycled price. This is because one must only pay for the supplies; not the brand name, tax, or, in some cases, shipping costs. In fact, in one case the upcycling was absolutely free due to the fact all the supplies were found around the house.
Conclusion
This graph explicably shows that retail is always more than up cycling. This is because the materials cost less. Also, you are saving the Earth by reusing, not making new products. The results turned out the way they did, because it always more expensive to buy new, than buy old and save the difference.
Reflection
I was not shocked by these results at all. I predicted that it was going to be much cheaper to upcycle than buy retail. I predicted this because I was able to buy end tables and large picture frames for just mere dollars compared to they cost in retail.