We hope all of our Upcyclers are having an awesome summer! It’s been a busy one for us at Upcycle That. In July we launched the Eco Summer promotion at the WTC More mall in Hong Kong. Summertime is hot and it’s important to stay hydrated. What do you do with your empty plastic bottles? You could recycle them, or you could upcycle them into massive sculptures! For Eco Summer we created 2 giant plastic bottle sculptures: a 6 foot tall tennis racket and a 2 meter wide shoe!

There are so many talented upcyclers in the world. For these upcycled sculptures we went global. The tennis racket was made in Vancouver, Canada and the plastic bottle shoe in Cape Town, South Africa!

Here’s the process behind the pieces.

The tennis racket was made from over 300 plastic bottles. These bottles were chopped up into tiny pieces and cast with resin in a mold. The tennis racket mold was custom made by Canadian artist Rob Dobie.

Do you remember that plastic bottle Kickstarter project we shared on Facebook? The tennis racket strings were cut using that plastic bottle cutter!

Rob did such an incredible job tightening the plastic bottle tennis racket strings. You can actually bounce a tennis ball off of them!

The plastic bottle shoe team was lead by Danielle Ehrlich. The amazing plastic bottle shoe they created reused 170 plastic bottles.

In order to make the plastic bottle shoe, they first made a wire frame shaped like a shoe. They then collected and cleaned plastic bottles and sewed them into sheets of plastic using an industrial sewing machine. These sheets of plastic were then attached to the wire frame.

Here’s a cool video they made showing the process from start to finish:

We took the completed sculptures to Hong Kong and launched the Eco Summer exhibit at the WTC More in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong.

As part of the launch there was an upcycled fashion show. These upcycled outfits were created by students at the Hong Kong School of Design.

The objective of Eco Summer was to show consumers the potential of plastic bottles. By creating larger-than-life sculptures we hope to inspire people to look at plastic bottles as a resource, rather than as waste.