Insights into Scaling Up Individual Upcycling

Kyungeun Sung, Sustainable Consumption Research Group, School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environment
Kyungeun Sung
Supervised by Tim Cooper & Sarah Kettley
Sustainable Consumption Research Group
School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environment
Individual upcycling in the UK:
Insights for scaling up towards
sustainable development

Table of contents
 Introduction
 Setting the scene
 Method
 Results
 Discussions and conclusion

Introduction

Community-level innovations or actions for sustainability
 Grassroots innovations
(e.g. Davies & Mullin, 2011; Horwitch & Mulloth, 2010; Longhurst & Seyfang, 2011)
 Community-driven development
(e.g. Alkire et al., 2001; Binswanger & Nguyen, 2005; Dongier et al., 2003)
 Bottom-up approach
(e.g. Akpomuvie, 2010; Danish, 1995; Rayner, 2010; Smith, 2008)

Grassroots innovations
 Social enterprises and social movements for greener economy in developed
countries (UK and USA)
 Low carbon housing & community renewable energy (Seyfang, 2008;2010)
 Organic food producer cooperatives (Bekin et al., 2007)
 Hubs of innovation (Horwitch & Mulloth, 2010) & social enterprises (Davies & Mullin,
2011)
 Transition towns (Longhurst, 2012)
 Poverty alleviation and capacity building of the poor in developing countries
(India)
 Honey Bee network (Gupta, 1995; 2000) & ICT for BoP (Heeks, 2012)
 Eco-preneurs (Pastakia, 1998) & commercialisation (De Keersmaecker et al, 2012)
 Capacity building (Middlemiss & Parrish, 2010)

Community-driven development
 Cases in developing countries
 Problems and challenges (Bebbington et al, 2004; Platteau & Gaspart, 2003)
 Obstacles to scaling up (Binswanger & Aiyar, 2003) & success factors for
scaling up (Binswanger & Nguyen, 2004)
 State-community synergies (Gupta et al., 2003; 2004)
 Empowerment (Grootaert, 2003; Krishna, 2003)

Bottom-up approach
 Cases in developing countries
 Self-help strategy for rural development (Akpomuvie, 2010)
 Decentralised energy planning (Hiremath et al., 2010)
 Sustainable urban development (El Asmar et al., 2012)
 Subsistence marketplaces (Viswanathan, et al., 2012)
 Inclusive development (marginalised people) (Danish, 1995)

Existing research
 Focus on:
 Expert-led poverty alleviation projects
 Market-led social enterprises
 Activists-led social movements
 Relative little attention to:
 Spontaneous, unorganised citizen’s collective actions

Aims
 Introduce the example of spontaneous, unorganised citizen’s
collective actions – individual upcycling
 Analyse from the perspective of Design for Sustainable
Behaviour
 Link behavioural insights to strategy development for scaling up

Setting the scene

Individual upcycling
Creation or modification of any product out of used materials in an attempt to
result in a product of higher quality or value than the compositional elements
(Sung, et al., 2014)

Benefits of individual upcycling when scaled up
 Environmental benefits (Ali et al., 2013; Goldsmith, 2009; Szaky, 2014)
 (-) need for new products > (-) materials and industrial
energy > (-) GHGs
 (-) municipal solid waste > (-) additional landfill spaces
 Economic benefits (Frank, 2013; Lang, 2013)
 Money saving
 SMEs (e.g. Sarah Turner in Sung & Cooper, 2015)
 Sociocultural & psychological benefits (Sung, Cooper & Kettley, 2014)
 Learning & empowering
 Sense of community & relaxing
 …

Increasing number of upcyclers but still marginal practice
 contemporary Maker Movement (Anderson, 2012; Lang, 2013)
 Physical resources (e.g. Hackspaces)
 Digital resources (e.g. Instructables, Etsy)

Research question
How can this emerging, yet still marginal activity, be scaled up into a
mainstream everyday activity in households (and possibly also in
industries) to make a bigger impact on the environment and society?

Method

Methods and sampling
 Semi-structured interview with 23 British residents (April-July, 2014)
 Interview schedule:
 Behaviour variance – how often; materials (what, how/where to get, how
to choose); what to do with end products
 Context of the behaviour – when; where; with whom
 10 Hackspaces/Makerspaces in 10 cities of 9 regions in England (based on
accessibility + activeness)
 A recruiting advertisement on Google groups/forums
 13 direct answer + 10 snowball sampling

Participants
 From 9 cities
 Between 24~66 years old
 17 (74%) British and 6 (26%) non-British
 15 (65%) male and 8 (35%) female
 12 (52%) in science and engineering; 7 (30%) in art and design;
4 (17%) in other areas (health service, business and management) or
unemployed

Analysis
 Anonymised transcripts
 QSR NVivo 10 software
 Thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006)
 Categorisation into (1) how often; (2) what materials; (3) how
and where to get materials; (4) why particular materials; (5)
what to do with end products; (6) when; (7) where; (8) with
whom
 Grounded codes

Limitations
 May not be generalisable to the overall UK
populations/makers/upcyclers based on the sampling method
+ limited sample
 Limited to the particular aspects of the behaviour
understanding – excluding behaviour factors, skills level, tools
involved, etc.

Results

Behaviour variance
 Frequency: ‘all the time’ ~ ‘once a year’ depending on the project or job
situation  enthusiastic hobbyists (environmentalists) ~ pragmatists
 Materials: (1) wood/furniture; (2) metal; (3) electronics; (4) fabric; (5)
packaging.
 Source of materials: (1) online shops + networks (males); (2) skips (males); (3)
charity shops; (4) car boot sales
 Material selection criteria: (1) potential value; (2) financial saving; (3) high
quality; (4) easy to handle; (5) un-recyclability
 Use of end products: (1) for oneself; (2) gifts to family/friends; (3) selling (with
high aspirations)

Context of behaviour
 When: ‘anytime that suits them’ (hobby) or ‘all the time’ (lifestyle)
 Where: ‘home’ vs. ‘Hackspace/Makerspace’ (tools and bigger space)
 With whom: ‘by oneself’ – difficulty in finding similar-interest people,
previous bad collaboration experience, increased productivity, preferences
towards no interruption and instruction

Discussions &
Conclusion

Implications for scaling up (behaviour variance)
 Frequency: ‘all the time’ ~ ‘once a year’ depending on the project or job situation  enthusiastic hobbyists
(environmentalists) ~ pragmatists  enthusiastic upcyclers > entrepreneurs + pragmatic
makers > frequent upcycling + non-makers > makers/upcyclers
 Materials: (1) wood/furniture; (2) metal; (3) electronics; (4) fabric; (5) packaging  focus of materials
provision improvement
 Source of materials: (1) online shops + networks (males); (2) skips (males); (3) charity shops; (4) car boot sales
 unified used material centre + online search platform
 Material selection criteria: (1) potential value; (2) financial saving; (3) high quality; (4) easy to handle; (5) un-
recyclability  materials information with the estimated potential value,
estimated money saving and quality rate
 Use of end products: (1) for oneself; (2) gifts to family/friends; (3) selling (with high aspirations) 
business feasibility test, technical safety test, niche market identification

Implications for scaling up (context of behaviour)
 Where: ‘home’ vs. ‘Hackspace/Makerspace’ (males)  tools hiring service and
daily/hourly charge for the workshop
 With whom: ‘by oneself’ – difficulty in finding similar-interest people, previous bad collaboration
experience, increased productivity, preferences towards no interruption and instruction 
community match-making events

Scaling up beyond hobbies and niche enterprises
 In-house designers in MNCs:
 Products worth mass-production
+ production technique worth
scaling up (cost-effectiveness
and sustainability)
 Effective & efficient systems /
services to take back
products/packaging (extended
producer responsibility)
http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/product-content/the-long-and-short/season-
one/images/freitag7.jpg

Scaling up beyond hobbies and niche enterprises
Deepening, broadening & scaling up transition experiments in niches in relation to multi-level
perspective (based on Geels and Kemp 2000, De Haan and Rotmans, 2009) from van den Bosch (2010)
 Niches in the multi levels of
sustainability transitions (Geels, 2011)
 Broadening: getting
different niches together
(linking it with repair,
reuse, other types of
sustainable DIY activities)
 niche-cluster  niche-
regime (van den Bosch, 2010)

Quick recap
 Relative little attention to more spontaneous, unorganised citizen’s
collective actions in community-level innovations for SD
 Individual upcycling in the UK
 Interviews with 23 British residents with practical experience
 Variance in behaviour + behavioural context
 Behaviour insights  strategies for scaling up
 Scaling up beyond hobbies and niche enterprises

Future prospects
 Developing, global ‘circular economy’ debate (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2015)
 Design movement for sustainable change: design activism (Fuad-Luke, 2013);
design for social innovation (Manzini, 2015)
 How every stakeholder (industry, government, NGOs, citizens) acts and
reacts

Thank you!
Any question?
Kyungeun.sung2013@my.ntu.ac.uk
http://kyungeunsung.com/
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kyungeun_Sung

Insights into Scaling Up Individual Upcycling

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