These Taiwanese companies are turning trash into buildings

IInsect shells, rice husks, water bottles and bamboo charcoal may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of high^­Productivity products. But Taiwanese recycling company Miniwiz uses them for just that. “We take leftover construction waste, leftover fiber, leftover plastic or leftover packaging and turn it into a building material that you can use for another 30 years,” says CEO Arthur Huang.

Carbon emissions from the built environment include “operational” carbon, resulting from uses such as lighting and ventilation, as well as “embedded” or “embedded” carbon, resulting from the extraction, production and transportation of materials. Between 2020 and 2050, embedded carbon is expected to account for nearly half of new construction emissions.

“We’re solving the built-in carbon footprint problem with very dumb logic,” Huang says. “You’re just using the carbon that’s already produced.”

Read more: How the cement industry is creating carbon-negative building materials

Extracting materials for the modern construction industry is carbon-intensive, but Huang believes we can eliminate carbon emissions from producing new materials by using things we would otherwise throw away.

Miniwiz has invented processes to transform more than 1,200 types of local waste into building materials that can serve everything from bricks or wall panels to tiles and air filters; Since its inception in 2005, Miniwiz has built a number of large-scale structures, including the earthquake- and fire-resistant Taipei EcoARK, made from more than 1.5 million PET bottles, and Anything Butts, a modular structure made from recycled cigarette butts. According to CO Miniwiz, recent projects such as the wall cladding at the AIRSIDE shopping mall in Hong Kong, built in 2023, reduce carbon emissions by more than 70% compared to traditional materials.₂ Summary of emissions.

Concrete, one of the most commonly used traditional building materials, accounts for up to 8% of total annual emissions. Wen-Yi Kuo, founder of materials development company LOTOS, is working to reduce emissions by extending the life of concrete and eventually hopes to replace the material with local waste-based alternatives.

Kuo has developed a product to help combat harmful moisture in buildings in Taiwan. Natural plaster, made from silt mined from Taiwan’s reservoirs, could replace cement-based alternatives. The material prevents water damage to concrete buildings and can be added to cement mortar as a waterproofing agent.

He went on to co-create C-Slurry, a concrete substitute that uses industrial waste, such as steel blast furnace slag, as a binder instead of cement, and he combined it with other forms of local waste, such as oyster shells and demolished red brick. to invent an alternative. low carbon building materials.

“If we want to be low-carbon and zero-waste, most of the materials need to be local,” says Kuo. “This has the added benefit of reducing carbon emissions from shipping and transport.”

Convincing clients to try something new in Taiwan’s “conservative” construction industry is a challenge, Kuo says. “We are introducing new technology to help solve people’s problems and thereby build trust.”

“Ultimately it comes down to whether someone is conscious and whether they’re willing to pay for it,” adds Miniwiz’s Huang. “So we use technology to find a way to make products at half the cost and twice as good.”

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