About The Uphub
The UpHub project grew out of the successful Rags To Riches (R2R) social enterprise, which was founded in 2009. The R2R team saw the need to expand its capabilities in making items from repurposed wood, plastic and textiles. The UpHub was born, and eventually awarded a Climate Challenge Fund grant for April 2020-March 2022 which will help with this expansion by providing financial resources for many aspects of the project like staffing, refurbishment, machinery, rent, workshops, etc. The UpHub works to continue and expand the success of R2R and provide the Govanhill community with education around climate change, practical upcycling workshops, items for purchase from the online retail shop, employability opportunities and a generous carbon savings.
While the funding for this project is now complete, we are continuing on with our work at the UpHub. To read about the work we’ve been doing as a part of The Climate Challenge Fund you can read our Final Report here.
Our Spaces
We work at The Deep End in our textiles workshop, wood workshop and plastic recycling hub. We use these spaces to facilitate all our community builds, workshops, product making and for all of our recycling and upcycling work. We also now offer bench and machine rentals which you can find out more about here.
Machines
We have a suite of machines from Precious Plastics designs: an extruder, a compression oven and a compression mould machine.Our pride and joy is our ‘new’ granulator: a 1998 Rapid Maskin AB granulator. It grinds up whatever plastic we put in (so far HDPE and PLA) and will save hundreds of hours of labour compared to our smaller shredder.With our extruder we can make square and round beams from various kinds of plastic, up to 2 metres long and a large enough diameter to use in some light duty construction of furniture, objects, small structures, and whatever else we can think of. We are keen to develop new and exciting products with our extruder, and to include the community in our progress.
Our manual compression machine is capable of pressing heated plastic into a mould. We have one mould about the size of a mini drinks coaster, but we are experimenting with new moulds so we have more variety in our capabilities.
The compression oven is basically a small oven with a contraption beneath it that squeezes the heated plastic using a scissor-style automotive jack adapted for use with the machine. We are developing various products with this machine, mostly flat, tray shaped items, but we continue to experiment with various shapes and sizes.
What are we making?
We specialise in working with repurposed textiles, wood and plastic. You can find some of our wares on the Rags to Riches online shop or by taking a walk around Govanhill and the surrounding areas with a keen eye out for our community builds, planters and art installations. Take a look at what we’ve been up to below!
Interested in our work? Get in touch with us at either uphub@govanhillbaths.com or ragstoriches@govanhillbaths.com.
A project by:
The UpHub and Climate Challenge Fund
The UpHub was awarded a total of £185, 404 by the Climate Challenge Fund. Find out more about the Fund here.
