What is upcycling?

“Upcycling is the process of converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of better quality or a higher environmental value.” - Wikipedia

Upcycling vs Recycling - What's the difference?

Upcycling is described as re-using an existing material, without degrading its quality before re-use, whereas recycling often entails degrading materials for re-use. For example, when recycling plastic bottles, they often cannot be turned back in to plastic containers used for consumption, due to the risk of things seeping into the plastic. Instead they become used in carpets or toys and eventually becoming waste products.

Therefore, upcycling is a process that can be repeated in perpetuity of returning materials back to a pliable, usable form without degradation to their latent value — moving resources back up the supply chain.

How does A1 Rubber Upcycle?

At A1 Rubber, we take a useless, waste product - tyre rubber - and upcycle it in to new products. Tyre rubber cannot be broken down, making it un-recyclable, and would otherwise be burned or used for landfill. Over 70% of our manufactured products contain tyre rubber that we source from tyre crumbers and and re-treaders all over Australia - in fact, we collect and re-use over 17,000m³ of crumbed tyre rubber every year.

We run the tyre rubber through a shredding process to create all different sized granules, which are then re-manufactured into our range of products. We are proud to say our off-cuts, rejects and even once-installed commercial flooring are run through a re-shredding process to be turned back in to rubber granules and used again in our acoustic underlays. This means we have virtually no waste, as we can continue to upcycle our products and materials into new products.