Here's a brilliant way to upcycle an otherwise unrecyclable material.

The Banque of France (their equivalent of the U.S. Mint) prints money.

To make the bills un-counterfeit-able, they use a proprietary printing process called EverFit. This uses cotton fiber paper that can be embedded with holographic stripes and fibers that react to UV, fluorescent lights or infrared. And to make the banknotes durable, both sides are coated with a polymer film.

But mistakes happen, and occasionally there's a misprint. A stringent inspection process weeds out the defective bills, which are then shredded.

The resultant material—cotton fibers mixed with polymers—is worthless and unrecyclable.

Enter Maximum, the French furniture company that turns industrial waste into products.

"Each fragment of [a shredded] EverFit® banknote," they write, "contains exactly the right proportion of materials needed for its transformation into furniture: a cotton substrate and two layers of heat-sensitive coating. Accumulated, heated, and then strongly compressed, EverFit® shreds form a rigid, smooth, and surprisingly resistant material: Billex."

Maximum uses this Billex material to make stools.

These can be nested, up to six high.

Furthermore, the stools "can be recycled infinitely in our workshops," the company writes. "Because at Maximum we are convinced that archetypes are meant to last and reinvent themselves in line with the challenges and resources of their time."