Upcycle? recycle? re-purpose?

I'm a crafted for those that don't know, aka I do crafts. While on etsy I've come across these terms used to describe items. I'm trying to figure out exactly what the difference is between them. I've googled the terms and not really found a clear explanation so I was hoping someone here maybe could clear this up for me.

If I take something, and using part of it make a totally new item which would that be?

I think all of the terms apply. You can safely use any of them in your description.

I thought they were the same, but didn't want to mistakenly call something the wrong name and get attacked by peoples.

Havonej wrote:If I take something, and using part of it make a totally new item which would that be?

I just had a quick look at a website that I suspected would use these terms liberally, www.treehugger.com and I think with what you're describing it's a combination of upcycling and repurposing with how the terms are used these days.

This said you're absolutely right, it's terribly confusing and literally speaking the words do mean the same thing (as far as I'm aware)... I gather though that in the eco sphere you could offend someone by using the wrong label so when I looked on tree hugger for what they'd tagged as upcycling, here's the list: http://www.treehugger.com/tag/upcycling/

It's confusing to me what they have in the list, but might make sense to you - it's definitely time these terms were defined properly though!

Thankies for the links... they still sound the same to me... (Just glad I'm not the only one that gets confused by them.)