The Beautiful Second Life of Decommissioned Buses

When London's decommissioned New Routemaster buses leave the roads over the next four years, many of them will be repurposed into mobile playgrounds thanks to an award-winning design idea from RUA Studios. The idea was selected as the winner of the Davidson Prize, established to award the best ideas for "rethinking the design of contemporary home and urban spaces." It's a smart concept, but it's not the only repurposing of buses and public transport vehicles that is working.

Across the world, heavy machinery, old military vehicles and subway cars have been used to rebuild coral reefs and provide spare parts for retrofitting or making new products. When we can move huge objects like military tanks and subway cars into the water, to me that's evidence that we could be thinking bigger about repurposing and reusing more big household things. On a recent visit to our local garbage dump, I saw a tower of discarded appliances and a huge area just for used mattresses. The world needs more design prizes and ideas for how to repurpose all of these things, too.