Taiwan ready to take recycling to new heights

Taiwan – A Taiwanese company, Miniwiz, is constructing an e-scrap facility near the capital city of Taipei that promises ‘the highest environmental standard of any recycling facility in the world’. As Arthur Huang, an architect with a passion for sustainability, puts it: ‘We want to take recycling to the next level.’

An unusual aspect of the development is that, besides extracting precious metals from discarded electronics, the facility itself will be built completely out of recycled materials. Huang, one of Taiwan’s leading entrepreneurs, has created a detailed model of the future plant, which, he explained, has ceilings built using plastics left over from CDs and DVDs, and walls out of glass fibre derived from computer motherboards.

He claims the e-scrap plant will make a big difference to Taiwan’s population of 23 million. For the island, home to a host of electronics firms such as Asus, Acer, Via, Foxconn and HTC, produces more electronics per head than any other country.

For a long time, landfills were the number only practical to getting rid of Taiwan’s large volumes of e-scrap, Huang noted. However, space soon ran short because mountains cover more than 70% of the island. The government introduced a zero-waste policy in response, and this led most of the population to start disposing of their waste products by using one of six large incineration plants located across the country.  

For more information, visit: www.miniwiz.com

Source: BBC News