The aim of this paper is to present the practice of upcycling as one of the most virtuous in terms of sustainability and of reintroduction of waste into cultural heritage. While recycling is a wasteful process in which the material is processed and its quality degraded, upcycling consists of transforming the waste, increasing its value and reintroducing it into the cultural heritage through a creative translation. To better understand the importance of a semiotic study in this direction, we present as a case study Frakta, the iconic blue bag by Ikea, which - especially since 2017, when Balenciaga presented its very expensive Carry Shopper Bag, which is very similar to Frakta - has become an international cult object of upcycling. We then see how Frakta - which is considered waste because it suffers a loss of meaning as a commodity - is transformed into anti-Covid masks, dresses, hats and so on. In these cases, according to Jean-Marie Floch’s classification, the added value is ludic-esthetic and not critical or utopic, as in other famous upcycling examples such as Freitag, whose ecological goal is explicitly stated in the product description. Other elements taken into account in the semiotic analysis of this type of upcycling are: the fact that Frakta itself is a virtuous example of recycling, the display of the Ikea logo in upcycled objects and the spread of this practice first via the Internet and then through major sustainable fashion brands such as Virgil Abloh's Off-White.