The month was January, and the day was Career Day - that fateful event where our parents suddenly morphed into ardent preachers of their chosen profession, and when the kids with parents that had cool jobs like Formula One drivers puffed out their chests and preened like strutting peacocks. The school year of 2018 was drawing to a close, and it was time to embark on one of the more arduous exercises that marred the creamy clean stretch of three weeks on the calendar we had to slave through in order for Spring Break to begin.

The three careers I had chosen to investigate were ‘Dentist’, ‘Journalist’ and ‘Upcycler’. The last choice, a slight deviation from the rest in that it a) didn’t have a college major modelled upon it and b) therefore was immediately useless to any of the kids looking to wheedle a university concentration out of this exercise (read: all of us), had been a spur-of-the-moment decision that I now immensely regretted making. Holding a pack of Xylitol gum in my hand that the dentist parent had passed around at the end of class - reminding us anxiously that we still had to brush our teeth no matter how much gum we chewed - I traipsed down to the first floor of the Senior school building, into the classroom where the ‘Upcycling’ session was scheduled to drone on for the next hour and a half.

Our lecturer entered the room wearing a beige cardigan over a flower-patterned dress with a halter scoop. Setting her flower-patterned tote (were they meant to match?) on the drab wooden podium in front of the blackboard, she spread her arms akimbo and asked:

“Does anyone know why this dress has a neckline like this?”

Guesses were lobbied. Was it because it was the most professional cut to wear in Career Day protocol? Was it because it was fashionable? When all else failed, one boy asked - was she terribly insecure of her collarbones?

Wrong, wrong, and hilarious but wrong, she told us, and smiled as the Epson projector that was probably older than all of us put together spluttered the first of her slides onto the chalkboard. ‘UPCYCLING’, it read in bold copperplate letters across the top of the slide. Underneath it was a catalogue with photos of dresses - one of them hers - running alongside each other under the title ‘Recycling is IN’.

“It’s incredibly easy and eco-friendly for dresses to have a halter scoop, because it allows for all of the fabric to be used without any being pared down because of design issues,” she told us, winking. “Especially since this one was created out of a tablecloth.”

And with that, our 90 minutes of magic began.

The lecturer was like a flowerier and greener version of Mary Poppins. From the folds of her bag (made from the same line of tablecloths as the dress) she produced a lanyard riddled with ridiculous Disney pins and kitschy knick-knacks - her employee card to a centre that specialized in making upcycling accessible to the general populace, she told us. The projector almost died vomiting up the photos. Then she moved on to introduce some of the incredible people around the world she’d had the privilege of working with. One of them made a particularly deep impression in my mind - an 80-year-old woman working in Namdaemun market, who had one day noticed that the manufacturers of the leather bags she sold threw away so much of the leather after they cut out the pieces they needed from it.

“More specifically it was the zippers,” the lecturer told us. The projector fell prostrate at another stroke as she flipped slides. “The tabs at the end of zippers - you know? They just cut that out, like a mold, from these gigantic sheets of leather. And then the sheets were thrown away. More leather was being wasted than actually used.”

So the woman went to the zipper tab manufacturers and brought back about a hundred waste leather sheets. She started looking for ways to cut back on the amount of leather sheets that were fed into the machine. By the end of her expedition, not only had she devised a new geometric arrangement of tabs so the least number of sheets could be used, she had also figured out a way to upcycle the throwaway leather straps - by turning them into state-of-the-art bracelets.

“She inspired one of the most popular DIY courses that we teach at the centre. Students use leather zipper tab cutout sheets to weave these incredible bracelets, and for many of them that’s their first induction into upcycling - to the notion that recycled products aren’t always low-quality. All thanks to the efforts of this amazing woman.”

That day was my first introduction to the art of upcycling. It amazed me that people like our lecturer, who were dedicated to and passionate about the possibilities that reusing materials opened for the future of sustainable business practices, existed. I later found out that she was an employee who specialized in polymer engineering in the KUP Center - the technological hub of South Korea’s upcycling movement, located in Daegu. If ever in doubt of the future of upcycling, just pay a visit to KUP and enroll in one of their plethora of woodshops, bracelet-weaving classes, or take a stroll through the 24-7 exhibition of futuristic textile displays in their materials gallery. You'll find that recycling isn't shabby at the least.

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