If you think Green gifts are cheesy and expensive, well, keep that skepticism front and center and drop down to the end of this post for some UN-green holiday gifts from our friends at Best Buy.

If you really need to cut the Ho Ho HOLY COW No Cash for Gifts, then let’s find a cool way to say I love you when shopping this holiday season. Nothing says I love you like a pallet for your shoes with a new twist to living Green. As of today, consider yourself an Upcycler.

Upcycling is SO much more fun than recycling. Upcycling is taking something that has outlived its intended usefulness and gets converted into something even more awesome.

One of our favorite things to upcycle here at Hart of Green are shipping pallets!

Israeli designers, Junk+Ion, are absolute masters at upcycling shipping pallets and other everyday items into wonderfully useful pieces of art and furniture, like the DIY shoe rack you see here.

So what else can you do with shipping pallets?

Maybe more than wondering what you could build with salvaged shipping pallets, you could find yourself wondering, “Why would I want to use shipping pallets to make anything?”

One user in this pallet project metafilter says,

“Pallet furniture is actually a big deal right now, as used pallets are an endemic disposal problem throughout the industrialized world. But what’s being talked about is recycling the wood and using that wood to build furniture.”

Just as a reminder, when working with shipping pallets (or any lumber, for that matter)…be sure you are using non-treated wood. Pressure  treated wood has been treated with various chemicals to help it resist weather, rot, and insects.

Arsenic is the monster. Yeah, like the poison.

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