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Posts Tagged ‘California’

It seems like in the world of industrial and product design, everyone is trying to reinvent the shopping cart, but for Cross Media Visual Designer Ramon Coronado, he sees the foundation for a line of extremely modern and stylish furniture.

LA's shopping carts get a second life as a stylish furniture line thanks to Ramon Coronado, my new Sexy Upcycling Hero!

Besides being a new Sexy Upcycling Icon for his creative use of  the well known L.A. shopping carts , Ramon said that he wanted to design something that”commented on the shortage of parks and recreational functions in Los Angeles.”

Swing made from an upcycled shopping cart gives the children of MacArthur Park in LA something fun and safe to do

This came about after Ramon had unknowingly moved from a small neighborhood in an everybody-knows-everybody town called Cathedral City, to a very dangerous, low income area across from MacArthur Park. Observing the over-population of homeless people and overwhelming amount of trash, with busted shopping carts on just about every corner, he got the idea to start the Mercado Negro project; Mercado Negro translating into Black Market.

Functional, stylish, modern furniture made from a shopping cart, by Ramon Coronado

Check out some of Ramon’s awesome process shots:

This is like an upcyclers version of washing the oil from baby ducks after an oil spill, getting them back to square one and a 2nd chance!

Ramon Coronado used a heat gun to soften the plastic of the shopping cart to form it into a seat

Be sure to check out all of Ramon’s other cool design work by visiting his website, hopefully he will continue to make more Sexy Upcycled Icons!

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Upcycled Burlap Coffee Cozies by Tree Trekker

I’m a sucker for very few things, but FELT is definitely one of them. It’s such an easy, clean material to work with and not to mention that can be made from bamboo fibers and even from recycled plastic bottles. So naturally, when these Upcycled Burlap Coffee Cozies by Tree Trekker came into my upcycling radar, I instantly fell in love with the bright, beautiful colors and simplistic but purposeful design.

With cold and flu season coming up, you definitely want to be able to quickly identify your coffee cup from everyone else’s, and if you’re like me and everyone at your job comes in with coffee from the same place, it’s always better to be able to identify which one is yours by a cozy and not by the color of the lipstick ring around the lid (ick..).

But the best part about these cozies is that they have a button that is not only decorative but serves as a place to wrap your tea string around, which makes them skyrocket to the top of the Sexy Upcycling charts because they are definitely more than just an upgrade from you run-of-the-mill cardboard “sleeves” that they give you at the coffee shop, both design AND function-wise.

These cozies are made from burlap sacks that are repurposed and upcycled into coffee cozies that the folks at Tree Trekker collect from their local coffee shops in North Hollywood. Ahh I can smell the fame brewing from here for them!

Upcycled Burlap Coffee Cozies by Tree Trekker

To order your very own Upcycled Burlap Coffee Cozies, please visit Tree Trekker’s Etsy Shop!

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