Plastic bags and milk bottles are among items being refashioned by Northland artists into high-fashion jewellery.
Accessories crafted from recycled materials are growing in popularity as consumers continue to seek out more environmentally friendly products.
Kara Dodson, who owns the Tuatara Design Store in Whangarei, said items such
as brooches and necklaces were selling well.
"People are really excited by them ... They are recognised as inventive," she said.
The novel jewellery includes recycled resin pendants and collector-teaspoon necklaces.
"It gives people a feel-good factor knowing they are recycled as there is increasing consciousness of environmental issues ... I am stocking more and more."
Jeanine Oxenius makes rings and flower-shaped brooches from plastic milk bottles. The trained painter and jeweller from Whangarei Heads said she first made them to enter a "junk to green funk" competition.
They now sell for up to $70 each in galleries.
"I'm not stopping there. I've got big plans for milk bottles," says Oxenius.
Christine Butler from Opononi makes finely woven brooches from plastic supermarket bags.
For about three years, Butler has crocheted the plastic into forms and can make a brooch from just one bag - and always a used one.
Butler has the recycling bent hard-wired into her, having been brought up by parents who lived through the Depression and were good at making something out of nothing.
Even the wire in her brooches is sourced from old television sets.
"I go to the dump and attack them [the TV sets]."
Butler is also influenced by Pacific Island cultures and their reuse of plastics.
