Repurposing. Taking old industrial products and coming up with ingenious ways to use them for completely new purposes, purposes you would never think of. Even Michael Jordan, basketball superstar, has become a part of this industry with the opening of his new restaurant in Chicago. “Repurposing” is the new frontier in landfill diversion. And, this is just one of several incredible projects that architects/designers have sourced materials from repurposedMATERIALS to complete.
The wall of the restaurant is actually maple wood from a gym floor in the Penn State University system. It’s interesting looking at the different panels of flooring and noticing that there are three different colors. There are cream, yellow and blue lines crisscrossing the wooden slats. Take a closer look at the restaurant photos, and one can see all three of those colors on the restaurant wall.
Basketball court flooring is a fun and unique repurpose, but it has more possibilities than just being repurposed into a decorative wall. The panels could be repositioned into a new design for a floor, or turned into a table or counter top. There are endless repurposing possibilities.
Another architectural repurpose sourced from repurposedMATERIALS was by Lundberg Design in San Francisco. They viewed the translucent, acrylic tiles we had for sale not as the safety tiles to add an extra layer of protection under the wood mulch on playgrounds as they were manufactured to be but as an ingredient for an interior restaurant dividing wall in the trendy Presidio neighborhood at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge.
An additional unique repurpose was when the owners of a downtown Chicago penthouse repurposed rolls of used turf for their rooftop. This wasn’t just any turf, but turf the Harvard University soccer field they’d acquired from repurposedMATERIALS.
When Damon Carson, founder and president of repurposedMATERIALS, is asked why he thinks this business has taken off so fast, he replies, “because people love the before and after.” The basketball court and the restaurant wall. The playground safety tile and the translucent dividing wall. It’s the “childhood creativity” that draws people like Michael Jordan to the company and to the work they do.
There is no limit to how far repurposedMATERIALS can grow. Because of the creativity of its buyers, customer base, owner, and employees, this business is not short on ideas. Repurposing is a process anyone and everyone can become involved in, from at home DIYers, to construction workers and famed basketball players.
