Material Reuse Quotes

Recycling is more expensive for communities than it needs to be, partly because traditional recycling tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they are designed for - a complicated and messy conversion, and one that itself expends energy and resources. Very few objects of modern consumption were designed with recycling in mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials, products must be designed from the very beginning to be recycled or even "upcycled" - a term we use to describe the return to industrial systems of materials with improved, rather than degraded, quality.

Most of suburbia will end up in three ways: ruins, slums, salvage yards for materials.

A hydrogen atom in a cell at the end of my nose was once part of an elephant's trunk. A carbon atom in my cardiac muscle was once in the tail of a dinosaur.

They fail to recognize the broad biological principle that organic material is constantly being recycled. Everything has a time of being - a birth, a life span, and a death.

But for the most part, for the majority of a stand-up audience, you better have new stuff they've not heard. And if you put an album out, just consider that material gone. At least that's how I see it.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

I constantly work with material that could be two years old, five years old, ten years old, as well as new things.

If the society toward which we are developing is not to be a nightmare of exhaustion, we must use the interlude of the present era to develop a new technology which is based on a circular flow of materials such that the only sources of man's provisions will be his own waste products.

The bathrooms - that usually would be a porta-potty - were wrapped in a fabric that was neutral to match the fort ... the same materials that were used to cover the bathroom, we said, 'Let's just use that [to cover a bar at the reception], because this is all we have to make the bar look better.' Which it did, in the end.