Construction tiles are usually crafted from porcelain, ceramic and even cork, but Taiwan-based upcycling company Miniwiz has made them from plastic bottles and fabric waste that have been shredded, melted and moulded into solid hexagonal pieces.
They are made by the company’s new mobile trash recycling and manufacturing plant called the Trashpresso.
The solar-powered machine was partly the brainchild of Hong Kong action star Jackie Chan, who featured it in his Green Heroes documentary series on National Geographic in April 2018.
The movie star showed Mr Huang some of his patterns and they invented the machine together.
The Trashpresso machine, which was on display at Milan Design Week, allows such upcycling to be done anywhere – even in isolated communities, he says.
Arthur Huang, the structural engineer and architect, who was in Singapore in early 2018 to speak on sustainability as part of National Geographic Live!, is a walking advertisement for recycled trash – from his dark-blue jacket fashioned from recycled PET plastic to his smartphone cover made of e-waste.
Creating attractive, “high-level” products from waste, he says, is all about appealing to consumers’ “lowest desires”.
The Taiwan-born United States citizen, who has a master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in the same field from Cornell University, started Miniwiz in 2005 when he saw how much trash Americans were producing.
In 2017, Miniwiz’s Pentatonic platform partnered Starbucks to turn coffee-cup lids and frappuccino cups into furniture for Starbucks cafes. And in 2015, it turned old sneakers into construction material for Nike stores.
It has also converted Taipei city’s food waste into bioethanol, transformed cigarette butts into bricks and created the EcoARK pavilion in Taipei out of 1.5 million recycled plastic bottles.
Miniwiz does not have any projects in Singapore yet, although it is open to the idea.
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Source: The Straits Times, 12 May 2018