“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. “Polli-Brick is just one success out of a myriad of trials and errors.”
A 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.
In Taiwan, to his relief, he found a different story. 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. According to Plastics Technology, in 2015 more than 1,600 recycling companies were in operation, bringing in some US$2 billion in annual revenues.
Becoming a Global Leader
Today it’s hard to see any trash or even garbage bins while walking through Taipei. 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.”
In 1993, the trash collection rate on the island was just 70 percent — and virtually no waste was recycled. By the mid-1990s, two-thirds of the island’s landfills were full or nearly full.
For 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. Lee Wei-bin, a 37-year-old nurse, says she likes that initiative. “My job doesn’t allow me to be always there when the truck comes,” she says. “But I can go to the station whenever I want and also get some money back. I think it’s a good thing.”
Those caught trying to get rid of their trash improperly may risk fines or public shaming. “For a policy like this to work, you have to make each one responsible for his personal consumption. You need waste disposal to sit firmly in the public consciousness,” Lai Ying-ying, head of the Taiwan Environmental Protection Administration’s (EPA’s) waste management department, says. “It’s what makes [a] circular economy actually happen.”
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