“Sometimes I miss it, but the trucks circulate twice a day, so I never keep my trash in my house more than a day,” she says.įor those looking for more flexibility, Taipei has installed a smart recycling booth that adds value to a person’s mass transit access card for every recyclable bottle or can. Yuchen Hsu, a 26-year-old accountant, told me that she doesn’t mind she has to haul her waste to the garbage truck personally. While it may sound a bit complex, the process seems to have won people’s favor. Some waste still ends up in landfills and incinerated.
Collected materials are sent to facilities where they get sorted and then sent to companies like Miniwiz or Da Fon that recycle them in a variety of ways. Volunteers and officials help people sort their garbage properly. A bright yellow pickup truck collects general trash, while a smaller white truck behind it has a set of bins into which people can throw recyclable materials, from raw food to cardboard. Classical music piped from trucks alert local residents that it’s time to go outside with bags containing the recyclables and mixed waste. The collection process is a community ritual. By contrast, recyclable materials like glass, aluminum and paper can be placed in any kind of bag. Taiwanese citizens must put their mixed waste into government-approved blue bags they purchase. Under the scheme, companies play an active role either by handling their own garbage or by paying a waste fee subsidizing a government-run fund for waste infrastructure.
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It also drafted a new waste management framework encouraging citizens and manufacturers to adopt practices that result in less garbage generated. Faced with mounting unrest, the government proposed erecting dozens of incinerators to burn waste. It took a raft of protests and blockades to change the situation.
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By the mid-1990s, two-thirds of the island’s landfills were full or nearly full. In 1993, the trash collection rate on the island was just 70 percent - and virtually no waste was recycled. Yet this transformation was hardly conceivable just 25 years ago, when the island struggled so much to clean up the waste resulting from rising living standards and soaring consumption that it had the unflattering moniker of “Garbage Island.” Today it’s hard to see any trash or even garbage bins while walking through Taipei. According to Plastics Technology, in 2015 more than 1,600 recycling companies were in operation, bringing in some US$2 billion in annual revenues. This densely populated island of more than 23 million off mainland China has one of the world’s most efficient recycling programs, claiming 55 percent of trash collected from households and commerce, as well as 77 percent of industrial waste. In Taiwan, to his relief, he found a different story. “Polli-Brick is just one success out of a myriad of trials and errors.”Ī 40-year-old structural engineer and architect, Huang, the company’s CEO and co-founder, set up operations in Taiwan in 2005 after a failed attempt in New York, where he found few Americans who shared his will to reduce the staggering amount of waste humans churn out every day.Ī Polli-Brick is a transparent module made from old plastic bottles that can be interlocked with others to build structures. “Over the past decade, we have experimented on over 1,200 different waste materials to figure out their mechanical properties,” says Huang as he sips a coffee from a cup made of broken iPhone screens.
These bricks are among countless products that Huang and his team at the international upcycling company Miniwiz derive from post-consumer waste, turning objects like aluminum cans, shoe soles and cigarette butts into building materials and more.
Named Polli-Brick, this colorless module made from old plastic bottles can be interlocked with others to build an incredible array of structures - such as the nine-story EcoARK pavilion, a sleek exhibition hall located a few blocks away in the heart of Taiwan’s capital. In a large open space overlooking central Taipei, Arthur Huang hands me a translucent, honeycomb-shaped polyethylene panel.
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