Planning to throw away the insides of your computer? Think again. You can make yourself a cool chess set instead! The chess board of this set is made out of the underside of a motherboard and 32 microprocessor chips. Bolts press fitted into the chassis helps elevate the board. The pawns are made out of capacitors while power transformers were transformed into rooks. To make the knights, power supplies with plastic encased relays were used with heads made out of inductor coils. Hard disk armatures were used to make the holy bishops while the beautiful queen was made out of a clock battery, RF choke filter ferrite core from data cable, electric motor core from pen-plotter motors and the crown out of hard disk platter washers with LEDs for jewels. The kings were made out of motor cores of two paper shredders with crowns made from hard drive washers, topped with the armature from old Zip drives.

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Uniforms made out of recycled materials seem to be the ‘in’ thing for environment minded sports persons nowadays. Nike’s team official team uniforms for the upcoming 2010 World Cup to be held in South Africa are made out of recycled polyester. Each of these is made out of at least eight plastic bottles. These were obtained from landfill sites in Japan and Taiwan. They were then melted down to produce yarn to make the jerseys. According to Nike estimates, this will help reduce energy consumption by around 30 percent. The kits are designed to keep players dry, cool and comfortable while playing and use ventilation zones on each side of the jersey. These ventilation zones are created by laser cutting 200 tiny holes into the fabric of the jersey.

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Who said that empty beer bottles are of no use! Tito Ingenieri, a resident of the city of Quilmes, has built a massive house using empty beer bottles and other trash. This house, which helped rid the streets of Quilmes of empty bottles, is supposed to be made using more than 6 million bottles. Tito Ingenieri says that he has also used other trash materials such as scrap iron in the house. The house also has some sculptures which are made from trash. Although the house doesn’t have too much of an aesthetic appeal it surely is helping the environment by recycling so many waste bottles.

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Now here’s a smart recycling robot that uses its laser eyes to sort plastic. Designed by IDEC, the Photonics Advanced Research Center, and Mitsubishi Electric Engineering, this robot was recently unveiled by Osaka University. Using its laser ‘eyes’ and sensors, this robot can distinguish between six types of plastic, making the recycling job a whole lot easier. Plastics are recyclable, though only 6% ends up for actual recycling. Distinguishing between recyclable and unrecyclable plastics by the naked eye is like picking a pin in a haystack. This 5ft 6in by 6ft 9in laser-equipped robot comes to the rescue and works efficiently.

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They once played beautiful melodies and charmed the hearts of many; these piano keys will now be recycled into a form of art. Piano parts and keys will be recycled according to the project taken up by Arts Council of Williamson County in collaboration with Steinway Piano Gallery of Nashville. These art pieces will then be auctioned at the Encore! Reclaim the Sound event in October. Parts like piano keys, foot pedals and tuning pins, key rails, benches and grand piano lids are being donated by Samick Music Corp.

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Do you love rock and roll? Itching to break that electric guitar of yours to impress your fans on-stage? Well, here’s a cheaper and more environment friendly way of breaking your guitar. No, you don’t need to smash your $400 Gibson anymore. Simply use the SMASH, the guitar created strictly for smashing purposes by a Japanese firm called K’s Japan. This electric guitar is like any other, except the fact that it is entirely recyclable once smashed and finished with. There’s more, the guitar also creates a smashingly devastating and destructing sound once smashed. After your done being all cool and angry with your smashed up guitar, simply send the parts back to the company and they’ll assemble it into a new guitar that will be given away to charity.

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Maybe this locomotive reminds you of the one dragging the Polar Express to the North Pole. But take a look inside and you’ll find yourself looking at luxury personified. Just outside the Izaak Walton Inn near Essex, you can live in this luxury lodging squeezed in a locomotive engine. This was a personal project by Tom Lambrecht, the General Director of locomotives for Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway in Fort Worth, Texas. His wife, Jamie designed the plush interiors of the locomotive. The locomotive would have been a pile of scrap metal if Tom hadn’t come across it two years ago. Recycling the unused locomotive and turning it into a luxury lodge was a difficult job done well with skylights replacing exhaust fans which have been left in place to create an ambience.

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Some people can make art out of anything and everything, and make it so appealing that it sells for big bucks! Artist Sayaka Ganz, 33, has created beautiful animal art using nothing but thousands of plastic spoons, knives and forks! She has managed to create a dog, eagle and fish, and a set of galloping horses ranging from 18 inches to eight feet in length, with around 500 pieces of junk, including sunglasses, cutlery and bendy baskets. Some of the wireframes are quite complicated and can take up to nine months to make. And seen as a collector's item, you can get one for yourself at $10,895.

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Have you just got yourself a pair of shoes? Well, don’t throw the packing box away! Use it to build an F1 car instead, just like the one made by the Wilson Brothers! Okay, this car doesn’t really eat up the tarmac like those cool Ferrari’s and McLaren’s. But it sure makes a green statement and enlightens us on the need for recycling. This car was built using Puma shoe boxes and was a part of the installation at the shoe company’s new store at North State Street, Chicago. So who are the Wilson Brothers? Three guys, Oscar, Ben and Luke, with an expertise in graphic design, industrial design and music, came up with this awesome idea together.

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Using mist to create drinking water sounds like a science fair project. Well, it is now being applied on a larger scale to create 10-20 liters of water per day and not just a few drops! So how does this new way to water creation work? Using the DropNet fog collector, drinking water is harvested from mist in the air. This easy to assemble apparatus filters tiny water droplets from fog clouds and causes the droplets to coalesce. It can be helpful in isolated and far flung areas and if used in an array, these fog collectors can quench the thirst of an entire village.

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We know of plastic bottles being recycled to make a whole lot of amazing stuff. This time, they will be used to make uniforms for the Coca-Cola staff at this year’s Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Made out of 120 plastic bottles, these uniforms will help Coca-Cola go carbon neutral. The company has been a loyal sponsor for the games since 1928 and plans to go green for the upcoming games this year. This isn’t the first time Coke has made a green statement with recycling bottles. PET bottles have been used before to make the world’s biggest recycled artwork during the Recycle Week in Great Britain. The company also opened the world’s largest bottle-to-bottle recycling plant in South Carolina that will produce approximately 100 million pounds of food-grade recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic for reuse each year.

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The lovable Apple iBook has found a new life after death with a whole load of innovative designs that use recycled iBooks. The last time we heard of an Apple iBook being recycled was the Apple iBook G4 Clock. This time someone came up with the idea of using a recycled iBook for a table lamp. The lamp was made out of recycled parts and the base of a recycled iBook. Apple fans have yet another conceptualized artifact for their bedrooms and office desks. Recycled iMac G4 Lamp will give used iBooks a new life and is limited in stock. So be quick if you want one of these awesome lamps that will cost you around $125 from Etsy.

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Ever fancied sitting on your computer keyboard, just to see how comfortable it feels? Well now you don’t need to crush your workstation’s peripheral devices for curious comfort. Designed by Nolan Herbut, the interactive Wolfgang Keyboard Bench has its surface made entirely of recycled computer keys. And no, the bench cannot be connected to a computer and used to type with your backside (if that’s what you’re thinking). The Wolfgang Keyboard Bench was made using around two thousand recycled computer keys embedded on the surface of a Baltic birch wooden bench.

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The blockbuster 3D animation film of the year, Avatar has sure left a train of thrown away 3D glasses behind. Laid end to end, these glasses will cover a whopping 3,987 miles, the distance between Los Angeles to Angmagssalik, Greenland. This is around 42.1 million pairs of glasses worn, or 935,834 a day. Now disposing off all these glasses is sure to create a mountain of plastic. To prevent these, companies providing 3D systems like IMAX, Dolby Laboratories, Real-D and XpanD have cracked their brains and put forth a recycling program. IMAX claims that its glasses can be washed 500 times using a glass cleaning machine. Glasses by Dolby and XpanD are also reusable. The companies claim that there is no use of throwing them away since they can be easily cleaned and made sterile.

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Apple notebooks are now seeing a new after-life and are being recycled into – watch out for this – wall clocks. It may sound weird to have a wall clock shaped like an Apple notebook, but then again, it looks cool! Made from a recycled iBook G4 case, the Apple iBook G4 Clock uses a mouse for a pendulum. Powered by two AA batteries, the clock measures around 14 inches wide by 18 inches in height and boasts a quartz clock movement, and pendulum movement. The clock is customized to its core and can also be tweaked and modified further according to the buyer’s specifications.

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