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Most people are at least somewhat familiar with what recycling is, but upcycling or downcycling—not so much. So, here are some working definitions:

• Recycling is the process of breaking products down to their basic materials, which are then used to make new products.
• Downcycling is when recycling results in new products that have less value than the originals.
• Upcycling is when recycling preserves the value of the original materials and adds more value so that the new products have more value than the originals.

The basic difference between downcycling and upcycling is that downcycling creates a lower-value version of the same product while upcycling transforms recycled materials into a different, higher-value item. Currently, most recycling is downcycling.

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What is Embodied Value?

All products carry embodied value. Value is added to a product at every stage in its creation, from the extraction and acquisition of raw materials to the distribution, sale, and use of the item. That value is in the form of the costs, time, labor, and additional investments associated with manufacturing the product and getting it into the hands of consumers. All products also have an environmental impact in terms of the carbon they embody.

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors’ (RICS) Whole Life Carbon Assessment approach and Environmental Product Declarations have helped to simplify and better face the problems of measuring and quantifying the embodied carbon in products in recent years (EPDs). Four essential stages have been identified by RICS (Product, Construction Process, Use and End of Life).

These can be used to assign embodied carbon to specific components of a building’s materials and are further divided into subcategories. Such as:

• A1-A3: Product stage
• A4 and A5: Construction process stage: transport to site and construction installation process
• B1: Use
• B2: Maintenance
• B3 and B4: Repair and replacement
• B5: Refurbishment

What Is a Circular Economy?

Reuse has long been the practice with certain products. Think of the products that are packaged in reusable containers that need only be cleaned and refilled—the propane tank you return to the propane seller and swap out for a full tank, the milk delivered to doorsteps in glass bottles to be returned to the dairy company on the next delivery date, the beer that comes in large metal kegs that must be returned to get the hefty deposit refunded. These all are examples of items designed specifically to be reused until they wear out or become damaged and can no longer be used for the original purpose.

Repurposing an item is to find a good use for it other than what it was designed for, without changing its essential nature. This is what’s going on when someone turns a wooden barrel into a planter, or cuts down the legs on a kitchen table to make a coffee table, or paints a wooden pallet and hangs it on the side of a barn as folk art.

Reclamation most often is used to mean returning land to its original state after having been disturbed in some way, for example by drilling or mining or agricultural activities. But materials can also be reclaimed in the sense of deconstructing products and reclaiming certain elements. This is common in the construction industry, where valuable materials, particularly metals like copper and steel, are removed (or reclaimed) from the waste stream after a demolition job.