The Beauty Of Upcycling

Carries on her family’s waste-not tradition.

- Alissa Hessler

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP in Arcata, a hippie town in the isolated coastal reaches of Northern California, recycling was part of my life from the start. Founded in 1971, the Arcata Community Recycling Center was an early nonprofit recycling center. Every month, from age 3 on, I would help my mother sort our glass by color and our plastics by number, load up our Ford Taurus station wagon, and head to the recycling center. It was a loud, busy, and exhilarating trip; we sought out the correct bins for our items and watched the conveyor belts pull them up to be spewed out into mountainous categorized piles.

My mother rewarded us for helping by splitting up the returnable profit and giving us 30 minutes to peruse the on-site reuse shop for secondhand treasures. I would proudly return home with things that needed a little reinvention and TLC, like a porcelain doll with a broken leg. I sculpted a new foot for her using plastic shopping bags and masking tape. She became one of my favorite toys.

By turning recycling into a fun family activity, my mother helped shape my sisters and me into mindful stewards of the earth. While this simple monthly outing taught us early development skills, like sorting by color and number, it also connected us to the life span of things, making us able to envision unique ways to repurpose and repair objects that would otherwise end up in a landfill. I’ve carried these sensibilities with me into my adult life.