Upcycling – reinvent your assets
Darren Jones, who co-ordinates CAMA’s Green Team services, is also a professional when it comes to upcycling. He can see potential in items that many of our clients and productions ask us to dispose of or recycle.
Darren and the team are keen for our customers to adopt a circular economy approach to their assets and furniture in storage, and help them to see the reuse value in unwanted items.
Recently, we had a large number of chairs that came into store from a customer’s head office. Through our online asset management platform, our customer had initially ordered for the chairs to be recycled instead of reused.
Instead of breaking down the chairs to their component parts and recycling them, Darren organised the chairs to be delivered and reused by an organisation in the community. He also upcycled a couple for his family.
He tells us how:
“I love timber. When we saw these chairs we started to consider how we could upcycle them. The timber was originally scaffolding boards so this would be the second time they were upcycled. A great example of keeping materials in the circular economy.
We like uncluttered practical furniture and decided to adapt the wood to make two bedside wall shelves, for our recently renovated bedroom.
With an industrial style in mind we choose wrought iron Gothic style shelf brackets to complete the project. The chairs were dismantled and sanded to remove the dirt and show the beautiful grain. They then had a couple of coats of beeswax to seal them.
Using metal brackets at the rear we joined the sections together, then used flush mounts to secure them to the wall. The wrought iron brackets were originally supposed to go underneath the shelves, but we decided we like them and wanted them to be more visible, so re positioned them on the top of the shelves.
We had been searching various sites to purchase something similar to this , and had seen prices in the region of £265 each, this project only cost £46 in total, so we are really pleased with the outcome.”
To find out more about CAMA’s upcycling and sustainability service please email The Green Team at green@cama.co.uk or call the office on 020 8526 8030.
