First off I apologize for the cringeworthy title.

Anyways, this week we talked about some of the different cradle-to-cradle business models, one of them being upcycling. I’ve always found upcycling to be really interesting as I like the idea of turning old and broken things that ordinary people would discard and then turning them into something new and useful.

One company that I found that practices upcycling is this shop called The Piano Gal Shop.

They are this neat little company which performs different services such as piano tuning, piano selling, music lessons, and they also make artwork out of broken piano parts and other instruments.

The owner, Marta Hansen, utilized her love of music and art into making beautiful pieces of artwork out of old materials which she can actually sell in her store.

“I wanted to do the music store thing, but in a very creative way.”

Some of the pieces of artwork include wall art out of old sheet music, broken pianos into tables, and old records into clocks. Here are some pictures of some of the stuff that she’s made:

On the business side of things, I think it’s great to see a business like The Piano Gal Shop doing something different for a change and making a positive impact on the environment as well as making profits at the same time. They don’t incur any costs as well except time and effort as people donate their broken instruments.

Not only does this reduce waste as these old piano parts and sheet music aren’t going to the landfill, but these items are given a new purpose as Marta adds value to them by turning them into creative pieces of art that people actually want to buy and display in their homes.

All this talk about upcycling has made me pretty excited and motivates me a bit to find items around my house that I would generally discard but now I’ll see if I could turn them into anything useful like Marta.