The need for markets

The first thing to be considered when looking at upcycling is the existence of markets.  Not markets for waste (there is rarely shortage of waste), but markets for products recovered.  Upcycling without a market is not upcycling.  It is moving waste from one home (landfill or incineration) to another (stockpiles perhaps, or downgrading some otherwise pure product).  The waste remains waste.

Markets before upcycling is an almost backward view of waste recycling.  In waste recycling, we look at what is recyclable, perhaps what "should" be recycled in some broader morality, and then start to separate it.  We create these mountains of "recyclables", and since they are not marketable, the mountains grow.  And then we need intervention, perhaps in the form of subsidies, regulatory support, forcing the public to pay for this activity.  All the while, the mountain grows and any nascent market is flooded out of existence.  The Australian wool stockpile of the 1990s is a classic example of this problem.

So markets are vital to upcycling.  The markets do not have to be mature, and they can be born out of next to nothing (ie a "blue ocean strategy"), but they have to be real and they have to be nurtured.  A market cannot be forced by fiat, but it can be created (or to be more precise, new niches can be created).  Indeed, the creation of new markets must be one of capitalism's underlying sources of dynamism, something most obvious in technology and e-business, but common to all of business.  The challenge of upcycling is to recognise where a new niche can be winkled out of the existing status quo, and the products extracted from the waste targeted into that niche.

The successful combination of materials extracted from waste, and markets able to absorb those materials is a bedrock principle of upcycling.  For this to translate to a business, and I would contend that it must, the whole enterprise must at least cover costs taking into account saved waste disposal costs, processing costs and income from material extracted.  It is the height of foolishness to run a business as a loss in a capitalist society - cost recovery at a minimum is capitalism's equivalent of gravity, and really, it must turn on profit.  A venture established without any plan to making a profit is a charity and doomed to eventual failure in the face of a continued barrage from profitable business.  In the context of upcycling, this is not clever.  It is lazy.

Let's not be lazy.  Let's go get those markets.  They are not hard to find.