Recycling is a process wherein discarded items are reclaimed and reformed into a new construction, with new purpose and meaning. Participants with People's Picnic in Barcelona, Spain use mimesis and alterity, drawing on the original attributes of cultural items to expose and subvert capitalist, state systems. Through negotiated practices of direct action found in their social organization, economic behavior and style, participants act out an anarcho-punk narrative. In this narrative, waste becomes food, Mainstream style transforms into deviance, organization challenges hierarchies, and gifts serve as activist protests. Recycling is the tool for the construction of these subversive identities.

In the miming back of Mainstream style, organization, and economy, participants with People's Picnic Barcelona create political statements messaged through the constructed distortions of the original pieces. These distortions provide for the creation of an anarcho-punk practice that simultaneously subverts and exposes the capitalist, state system. These recycled identities, acted out in practice, ideologically and behaviorally oppose the oppression anarcho-punx perceive in the dominant culture.