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Objects, materials, or things have played a very important role in understanding people’s behavior in a particular culture. This is the main reason why things from the past are considered precious and why we store them in museums. As described by Griffith (2013), history museums host mundane objects, such as bricks and pipelines that reveal part of our history and tell stories about our past. They are displayed to a curious public and romanticize an image of ancient times. However, materials not only become relevant to us when they are declared ancient and ready to be preserved behind walls. They can be interesting to engage with in the here and now and can trigger interesting stories about how people relate to their daily environment. In this presentation, we explore upcycling - the creative re-use and transformation of useless or waste materials - as a promising sensory research methodology. The focus on upcycling has known a considerable uptake in recent years. Upcycling not only gained popularity in the art circuit, but also in diverse educational contexts, including community work, youth work and adult education courses. However, research projects that embrace an upcycling component are rather scarce. We describe a co-creative project, called ‘Magnificent Rubbish’, in which we worked together with Arktos (a Flemish training organization for children and vulnerable youngsters) and Vizoog (an artistic organization specialized in upcycling techniques) in a Belgian urban renewal setting. The research project could be seen as an exploration of the relationship between citizen and neighborhood in terms of a 'livable' environment, by stimulating the imaginary power of youngsters to create something new with traces from the environment. Photowalks, soundwalks, and creative upcycling workshops were integrated in the research process to allow youngsters to express themselves through various formats. Through working with materials from the neighborhood (visuals, sounds, found objects, rubbish, and so on), we hoped that participants’ experiences in relation to a place could be shared and negotiated. It culminated in a public exhibition in the neighborhood that showcased an interesting archaeology of the here and now. We reflect on the multiple possibilities related to the use of upcycling as a co-creative sensory research methodology as well as the challenges we faced to implement the different research components and to collaborate with different stakeholders.