The U-Café initiative has been awarded the Newcastle University, Best Environmental Initiative of 2013. 

U-Café was designed to gauge a range of possible perceptions around notions of waste, value and utility. The interdisciplinary team of researchers and students from CESER, School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, School of Architecture Planning and Landscape, Centre for Urban and Regional Development, School of Arts and Cultures, School of Mechanical and Systems Engineering and Newcastle Institute for Research on Sustainability constructed a Café made from materials described as rubbish or waste.

The café was designed as a means to challenge perceptions around defining waste, the structure created from materials normally discarded into landfill or a recycling stream.  Central to up-cycling is a notion of adding value to materials and objects.  This process acts to encourage people to question whether items have actually reached the end of their useful life.  Defining the quality of this added value is complex and ambiguous, as people can have very different ideas of why to keep an object out of the bin.  The central question for the U-Tec team was how to promote up-cycling as a way to encourage people to behave differently towards food and product packaging?  Would it be possible, for example, by releasing the hidden value of product packaging (milk cartons, plastic drinks bottles and tin cans) to encourage people to live in a more environmentally sustainable way?

The Cafe was ‘open for business’ between Tuesday 16 and Thursday 18 April and attracted over 150 customers who participated in the research and were entertained by recitals from Hadrian Primary School’s upcycled orchestra and by ‘Junk Agency’, a group of Newcastle University musicians who will perform a concert with music made from sampling CDs and cassettes found in rubbish bins and skips.