Upcycling is spring's hottest new trend: interior designers ensure no material is wasted with this season's eco-friendly homeware ranges
The Environment Agency recently warned that criminals are abandoning so-called recycling centres leaving mountains of waste - there were 989 illegal waste sites in 2015-16. All the more important for waste to find new uses, and designers are helping.
On the mass market, Ikea is leading the way. They've made the front of new kitchen units by wrapping reclaimed wood with a foil made from the discarded plastic PET bottles (that's polyethylene therephalate) that often go to landfill.
London designers with passion for pattern dazzle at Milan Design Fair
By contrast, in a workshop at Somerset House on the Embankment, young Londoner Conor Taylor is fashioning a new material he calls Foresso - "a timber terrazzo." He's noticed that high quality timber in wood workshops is regularly wasted. "Delicate curls of planed wood and beautiful larger pieces simply get burnt, or pulped for filler."