Step into the Arab Street office of social enterprise Terra SG and you will be greeted by the sight of upholstered seats made from tyres, juice cartons-turned-coin pouches and vodka bottles filled with fairy lights.
One man’s waste is another man’s treasure – and the environmental group is on a mission to encourage more people in Singapore to not just realise that, but also convert waste materials into useful products.
“We have to make something functional, useful. We don’t want to create just for the sake of creating,” says former engineer Eric Oh, 43, who co-founded Terra SG with his friend Kelvin Wong, 35, two years ago.
Terra SG conducts workshops to raise awareness of green issues and also sells upcycled products ranging from coin pouches ($5) to customised tyre seats ($149).
Mr Oh says that while awareness of environmentally sustainable movements such as upcycling has been on the rise in Singapore, there are still many people here who have misconceptions about it – and so are unwilling to pay good money for repurposed goods.
Terra SG aims to correct these misconceptions through its workshops, pop-up stores and education programmes.
Running upcycling workshops, Mr Oh adds, has been a more economically sustainable way of generating revenue than simply selling upcycled goods.
In the two years since Terra SG started running such workshops, it has seen growing interest from corporates, seniors and schools.
“People like the idea that they can do it themselves. They like having something that they can make,” Mr Oh adds.
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Source: The Straits Times, 28 April 2018