Old buses never die, they just end up in your living room.
That, at least, is what a group of students would like to see happen after turning relics from disused Kowloon Motor Bus vehicles into a range of environmentally friendly furniture.
Students from the Hong Kong Design Institute turned 600 components from the buses, including seats, handrails and windows, into 10 pieces of household furniture and equipment, including a coffee table and an LED lamp.
Understanding the characteristics of each component was the key to crafting creative products, said Yolanda Leung Ching-ki, 18, a second-year design student. She turned a bus window into the surface of a coffee table, with metal pipes as legs.
'I twisted the pipes to make them symbolise the routes of KMB that extend in all directions,' she said.
Before her design project, environmental protection to Leung meant recycling. 'While I was doing my design, I learnt that we could actually add value to the waste, turning it into useful products,' she said. Fellow student Tam Chui-yi, 22, said her LED floor lamp was inspired by handrails and bells, items commonly found in buses she is particularly fond of.