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Swiss design firm Tät-Tat has an unusual manufacturing model: "The husband and wife design team, Benedikt and Brigitta Martig-Imhof, are former teachers who work hand in hand with social work programs and institutions throughout Switzerland and Germany, employing up to 300 special-needs persons." They also look at waste as their raw material, and seek to repurpose it into objects of everyday use. Some examples of their work:
This pack of 70 rubber bands is made from recycled bicycle and motorcycle tubes.
This letter opener is made from recycled bicycle spokes.
This soap dish is made from acrylic harvested from flatscreens dismantled at an e-waste processing facility.
You can see more of their work here, and there's a video showing some of their processes below.
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I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.
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Upcycling Bike Parts and More Into Useful Objects
In Madagascar, the traditional tubular zither made of bamboo called valiha now uses the wire from a rear bicycle cable for strings.
I slice up old bike tubes too. I learned about re-use as a kid in Japan seeing the rubber tires on tugboats as fenders & the chains holding up the tailgate on trucks are covered in old tubes to prevent chafing & noise. It was common to see a lady coming around with a pushcart for you to trade in newspapers for toilet paper. She used the tubes for tie-down straps for the mounds of paper.
my experience as a biker of 50 years is that the rubber of inner tubes used as rubber bands fails quickly compared to normal rubber bands.