Occasionally on the sidewalk you'll see what looks like an entire apartment being thrown away, including all of the fixtures. Kitchen cabinets made from particle board are smashed up and thrown into the back of a garbage truck.

Italy's Valcucine has come up with "gReenaissance," a line of kitchen cabinetry in glass and aluminum that will hopefully never be thrown away:

[We have produced] the first 100% recyclable kitchen having a structure made of drawn, recycled aluminium. For its production, this material requires 20% of the energy required to obtain primary aluminium.

The new glass base units' system, INVITRUM, is easy to assemble and to disassemble because it is connected using only mechanical joints. The new and evolved structure with glass base units, slim and with formally very clean cut lines, has been designed to eliminate double side panels, that are also in glass and only 10 millimetres thick.

This solution, invented by Gabriele Centazzo, designer and managing director of Valcucine, allows for a remarkable decrease in the volume of materials used: this results in less waste of resources and energy. Lastly, the exclusive use of glass guarantees total recyclability of the unit, absence of glues and formaldehyde emissions as well as absolute resistance to water, steam and heat.

"gReenaissance" is scheduled to be debuted at Fuorisalone 2009. (Neither Valcucine nor Fuorisalone has web links up yet.) We're guessing the line is going to be well out of the price range of the common man; but we hope that, like airbags and cell phones, what started out as things exclusively for the rich will eventually trickle down to the masses.