Green Options

If you doubt there are a lot of clever and green do-it-yourselfers out there, check out Yahoo! Green’s Make It Green gallery, which features — as of today — 21 ideas from real people across the country looking to make the planet a better place.

For a $10 entry fee, anyone with a great do-it-yourself project can submit his or her idea to the site, where visitors can vote for the ideas they like best. Yahoo! will also put on display some of the top product ideas during next week’s Maker Faire in San Mateo, California.

I love coloring.  All of my best creative ideas come while I’m coloring on the pages of my day planner, or the grocery list, or my husband’s left arm.  I have tins and tins of crayons that I’ve collected throughout the years.  I am, also, a crayon purist.  Once a crayon breaks, I throw it in the tin and it is officially “out of commision.”  After realizing that these crayons are just as good as the unbroken ones, I started thinking about how I could breathe new life into them.  That’s how I came up with the idea to make new crayons out of old ones, with the help of some silicone molds.

Upcycling, a phrase coined by Cradle to Cradle authors William McDonough and Michael Braungart, is the act of creating useful products from waste materials.  You’ve probably seen several upcycled products on the market today–reusable bags are often made from old plastic bags, t-shirts, or other upcycled materials.  TerraCycle is now upcycling many products, including juice pouches and cookie wrappers.  Among design junkies, craftsters, and green folks, upcycling is the latest challenge to combat climate change.  My only gripe is I keep seeing the same upcycling ideas–the aforementioned reusable bags, the old t-shirt revamp–and they’ve been done.  Fortunately, places like Ready Made Magazine and Instructables continue to facilitate new upcycled products.  Here are six creative, practical upcycling projects that, with a little time and skill, you can do at home.