From a distance, the building looks like a smart new addition to Taipei’s skyline—an angular, approximately nine-story-tall silver and white structure on Zhongshan North Road, not far from Taipei’s landmark Grand Hotel. Close up, it is a surprise for first-time visitors, as it is constructed with plastic bottles—1.5 million of them to be exact.
Since the building, known as the EcoArk, has taken shape, it has received much attention not only from local media, but international media including the BBC, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, and Bloomberg news services. National Geographic also has been filming it for the last half year for the TV channel’s MegaStructures program to air in early January.
The Taiwanese company that built it, Miniwiz Sustainable Energy Development Co. Ltd., a relatively young company started by a Taiwanese overseas returnee in his 30s, has also garnered a lot of attention. That is because the EcoArk is the world’s first fully functional, large-scale plastic building made from recycled plastic bottles. Taiwan is one of the biggest consumers of plastic bottles in the world, with the island’s 23 million residents using up to 4.6 billion polyethylene terephthalate or PET bottles each year. It took the company only a couple of weeks to gather enough used bottles to make the building, which it did by collecting them from department stores belonging to the Far Eastern Group, the project sponsor and one of Taiwan’s biggest conglomerates.
Altogether, the EcoArk is 130 meters long by 48 meters wide and 26 meters tall. The building will be used to stage fashion shows and other exhibits during the six-month Taipei International Flora Expo, which starts in November. The exposition will be one of the biggest international events Taipei has hosted and the city government hopes to attract some 8 million visitors to the event, which aims to turn Taiwan’s capital into a city of gardens.
Completed in April, the building will be dismantled after the expo ends, but it will not be long before people start living in plastic buildings, according to Miniwiz managing director Arthur Huang. “This building was never engineered to be a one-shot wonder,” says Huang, whose company also designed the structure. “It was meant to be a demonstration of the kind of building that can replace current buildings. It can be produced, transported and assembled economically and at the same time have this low carbon and design effect.”
“I definitely can see people living in these buildings,” Huang says. He adds that polli-bricks, as the building material made from reengineered plastic bottles is called, could also be used to construct multi-story apartment buildings.
The idea for the EcoArk came about as the result of a new initiative focused on sustainability for Far Eastern’s 60th anniversary, as well as the desire by Miniwiz to make a building that had the smallest possible carbon footprint. Rachel Chen, the Far Eastern Group’s business development department adviser, says the conglomerate wanted to sponsor the Flora Expo because it thought the event would be a good opportunity for Taipei to step into the international limelight.
The EcoArk is the first large-scale building in the world to use recycled plastic bottles, says architect Arthur Huang. The structure can accommodate up to 2,000 visitors. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)
As to why the company chose to build an exhibition hall with PET bottles, Chen says that is because Far Eastern is a major manufacturer and recycler of PET bottles and it wanted to encourage the public to see the value in used bottles. One of the companies in the group, Far Eastern New Century (previously Far Eastern Textile), manufactures and recycles PET bottles, using them to make fabric for sports clothing, including jerseys worn by some teams in the recent FIFA World Cup held in South Africa, among other items.
“When Arthur Huang decided to make a building from PET bottles, Douglas Hsu [徐旭東], the chairman and CEO of the Far Eastern Group, felt it was a great idea, so we decided to build such an exhibition hall,” Chen says. “We hope this will let the public know that PET bottles can be used to build houses and that this will encourage the public to recycle PET bottles and not just throw them away, because they have many uses.”
The EcoArk, which is named the “Pavilion of New Fashion” by Flora Expo organizers, will not house plant displays, but will be the site of a number of fashion shows during the expo. Vogue magazine was to help design the fashion area, and major international and domestic fashion brands will be on display there, Chen says. There will also be a small art museum inside and art installations outside the building.
The exhibition hall will also showcase environmentally conscious features, including a water purification display. “We’re very confident this exhibition hall will attract a lot of attention at the Flora Expo,” Chen says. “We hope this will help everyone make environmental protection a way of life.”
The EcoArk also fits nicely with the Taipei International Flora Expo’s goal of holding an environmentally friendly exhibition, the organizers say. The other main exhibition halls purpose-built for the event are also considered green buildings as they were built with low carbon footprint materials and use solar energy. The EcoArk is the expo’s largest building. “Our mission is the three ‘r’s—reduce, recycle and reuse—and the three ‘g’s—green buildings, green energy and green transportation,” says Rin Lin, a media relations specialist for the Flora Expo. “The EcoArk fits our goal of reducing carbon and reducing energy use,” she says. Lin adds that as part of the expo’s goal of green transportation, electric shuttle buses, rather than gasoline-powered vehicles, will transport visitors from one exposition site to another.
Formally commissioned in 2008, Miniwiz actually began working on the initial concept of the building in 2007. The EcoArk was completed in April 2010, with construction taking two years, says Huang, a former teacher who came back to Taiwan after studying architecture at Harvard and Cornell universities in the United States. The architect says his company did not have to look too far for the inspiration behind polli-bricks. “We were looking in our trash can in our office and the biggest volume of trash was actually plastic bottles,” Huang says. Miniwiz already had the concept for the bricks before being commissioned to build the EcoArk, but put them into production for the project.
Although Taiwan uses a large number of plastic bottles, it also has a high recycling rate for PET bottles. Nearly 90 percent of Taiwan’s PET bottles are recycled, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), while globally, only about 26 percent of plastic bottles are recycled according to England-based PCI (PET Packaging, Resin and Recycling) Ltd. The rest mostly go to landfills.
Miniwiz managing director Arthur Huang stands next to a wall of the EcoArk, which uses bricks of reengineered plastic in an interlocking, honeycomb design. (Photo by Cindy Sui)
Because so much food-grade packaging is done with PET, Taiwan ends up with a lot of PET material, but contrary to a lot of consumers’ belief, food-grade PET material cannot be recycled into more food-grade PET material without the addition of virgin PET, Huang says. That means you can forget the notion that if you buy a bottle of water, you can toss the bottle away and it will become another bottle for water. Without the use of more virgin PET, it can only be turned into lower-grade products such as clothes, blankets, bottles for dishwashing detergent or, in this case, a building.
When heated, most thermal plastics release dioxins, which are harmful, but PET does not. That is why it is safe to reshape the PET bottles into polli-bricks to make the building, Huang says. The plastic-bottle building uses what Huang calls honeycomb geometry. The bottles are reshaped into hexagonal bricks with interlocking grooves, which fit tightly into each other like Lego pieces. The tight fit prevents wind or rain from penetrating the walls, and the design creates such a strong structure that it can withstand earthquakes and large typhoons with maximum sustained winds of up to 130 kilometers per hour, according to Huang. Each brick is hollow and is fitted with a cap. As the polli-bricks are quite light, a small amount of silicon is used during assembly so that they stay in place, making it easier for workers to move them around.
The EcoArk’s construction is based on foundations of concrete and steel, but the use of polli-bricks means it weighs only 72 kilograms per square meter including the steel frame. Huang says there has never been a building this size made from plastic bottles, as previous examples were small in scale, more like school projects. “Before, people were literally using bottles; nobody engineered them into a structural shape. This is the first time we’ve done that,” he says. The EcoArk can accommodate up to 2,000 people in addition to its display areas.
The easiest way to reduce a building’s carbon footprint, Huang says, is by paying attention to insulation, lighting and heating. In this regard, the insulating properties of polli-bricks make them suitable for use in hot or cold climates. In warmer climates, the polli-bricks are filled with air, which acts as a natural barrier to the heat. In cold climates, the bricks can be filled with water or sand, which absorb heat from the sun and provide natural heating. In the future, the bricks would be transported to a building site empty, then filled with air, water or sand depending on the climate at the location. Currently, polli-bricks are not targeted at locations with extremes of both hot and cold weather where the filler material would need to be changed. The EcoArk’s bricks are filled with air due to Taiwan’s warmer climate, but despite the hot weather the PET bricks will not melt because they have been reengineered to have a melting point of 280 degrees Celsius.
Letting the Light in
Lighting is another source of energy savings for the EcoArk. In the daytime, the building does not require lighting, even though it does not have any windows, because the plastic bricks let in light. “We tried to limit the amount of energy use so we tried to allow as much natural light to come in as possible,” Huang says. “However, when you walk into this space, you don’t feel any heat from the sun, so it’s not a greenhouse,” he says during a tour of the building. At the same time, the bricks, which are available in either transparent or translucent plastic and allow light to flood the interior, do not enable people to see inside the building.
At night, the EcoArk will rely on around 40,000 energy-efficient light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs, some of which are included in polli-brick light fixtures suspended from the ceiling while others are built into bricks used for the walls. The lights provide indirect illumination as the shape of the bricks means that the light deflects onto the surrounding bricks. As LED lights are available in a range of colors, future homeowners could choose to make their home glow any color, Huang says.
Other “green” features include a natural cooling system. The building is designed to create a “natural wind tunnel,” which Huang says will take in as much of the site’s cool northeasterly breezes as possible, as well as positioned to minimize its southern exposure to the sun by making use of shade from the surrounding trees. Collected rainwater will be pumped over the outside of the structure, which, along with a misting system inside, will cool the building. Although the EcoArk is designed so as not to need an air conditioning system, one was included “just in case” temperatures are unusually warm during the expo. The building also incorporates solar and wind-power systems to generate its own electricity. In fact, barring the use of air conditioning, the solar and wind-power systems will meet all the EcoArk’s energy needs.
An interior exhibition space also features polli-brick construction. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)
Functionally speaking, houses built of polli-bricks would be no different from other homes, Huang says. They would have plumbing and electrical systems, but preferably, homebuyers would want to mimic the EcoArk and install LED lighting, which is more energy-efficient.
To make the EcoArk at least as fire safe as any other building, Huang’s team included fire retardants in the chemical mix of the bricks and coated the building’s exterior surface with a fireproof laminate. Inside, a sprinkler system, fire hoses and smoke detectors complete the system. Despite popular misconceptions, high-grade plastic such as PET is actually less flammable than wood, Huang says. A fully fireproofed polli-brick home would give its occupants the same amount of time to get out and the same survival rates as a traditional home, he says. If the polli-bricks were filled with water or sand, the building would be a two-hour fireproof structure, meaning that occupants would have two hours to get out.
Huang believes there is also a role for buildings made from polli-bricks to replace the temporary housing that is provided to disaster victims, such as for some of the people displaced by Typhoon Morakot in August 2009. “Temporary houses are not sustainable. They have horrible insulation and bad lighting,” he says, referring to the construction of the temporary homes generally used to house disaster victims. The buildings are not environmentally friendly as they tend to use cheap plastic and polystyrene for insulation because it traps air. “Once the material is exposed to the sun, it’s like having a small amount of toxic gas released into the environment,” Huang says.
“Our company definitely thinks the polli-brick system has a long future ahead because it has a lot of advantages that most construction materials do not have,” he says. For one thing, it is particularly suitable in areas subject to earthquakes and typhoons. Since the hollow plastic blocks are much lighter than regular bricks, concrete or wood, a building made of polli-bricks would have a higher chance of staying intact during an earthquake, as well as causing less harm to its occupants even if it collapses, Huang says. “In an earthquake, a light building never falls. The heavier the building is, the more damage it will cause,” he says.
Another advantage of these plastic buildings is that the manufacturing is simpler. All the machinery required to produce the plastic bricks is relatively small and little energy is required. The system is also portable, which means the bricks could be assembled quickly in disaster-stricken areas. They can be built “very, very quickly because everything is manufactured in advance,” Huang explains. If all the parts are available, a structure could be installed in one day, he says. “They could be shipped to a disaster area and the construction could be done locally. That’s a powerful solution for any disaster-prone area,” he adds.
Moreover, a single-family home built with polli-bricks would cost about a quarter of the price for a house of glass and steel, or about half to three quarters that of a wooden house because of the cheaper material and simpler construction process, Huang says. “The reason why it can save a lot of construction costs is that it’s prefabricated into panels, which can be assembled relatively quickly instead of having a lot of manhours go into it,” Huang says. “The whole idea is [to reduce costs through] mass manufacturing rather than custom made.” Building such a home in Taiwan would cost around US$260 per square meter including solar panels and the energy-saving LED lighting, or around US$125 per square meter excluding solar panels and LED lighting.
In total, the EcoArk will cost about US$12 million factoring in all the planning, research and development, design and operations of the building, Huang says. If only the building materials, construction and manufacturing expenses were included, however, the architect says the cost would be around US$4 million, making it one of the cheapest buildings for its size and one of the cheapest public structures in Taiwan.
From the beginning, Huang’s company has manufactured green energy products. Even its name, Miniwiz, comes from the concept of minimizing the carbon footprint of goods and the damage done to the environment. The company, which was founded in March 2006, also has operations in Hong Kong. Besides polli-bricks, Miniwiz makes a selection of environmentally friendly products, such as rechargeable electric bicycles, energy-saving home appliances and solar-power devices.
Natural light floods the interior of the EcoArk, which was designed to minimize energy requirements for lighting and cooling. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)
Low-Carbon Reality
The company constantly strives to create projects and products that promote a sustainable lifestyle, Huang says, so the EcoArk exhibition pavilion is an extension of that philosophy. “We’re trying to demonstrate that this low-carbon building will actually work esthetically, functionally and sustainably,” he says.
In the few months since the EcoArk was completed in April, Miniwiz has received a lot of attention not only from the media, but also in the design industry. Its polli-brick design in August helped the company win the product category of the UK-based The Earth Awards. The awards aim to reward and encourage cutting-edge design that has the potential to drive positive change. Miniwiz received prize money of US$10,000 and as one of the five category winners the company was also eligible for the grand prize of US$50,000, which was scheduled to be announced in mid-September.
The government of Singapore has asked Miniwiz to build a sports center using polli-bricks, and a country Huang says he cannot name has asked the company to build portable military bunkers made of the bricks, which will be filled with sand. The company is also working on two projects in Taiwan. One is a factory in Guanyin Township in Taoyuan County, northern Taiwan for Super Dragon Technology Co., an e-waste recycling company that extracts precious metals including copper, gold and platinum from discarded computer equipment. The other project is a cemetery with nine mausoleums in Zhongli City in Taoyuan County for a company called Moonrice. Parts of both projects will be made of polli-bricks, Huang says.
But could such buildings make one feel less guilty about buying plastic-bottled drinks? Using virgin PET, which comes from petroleum, wastes the Earth’s resources, Huang says, but there is so much trash out there that people would not need to generate any more bottles to create these buildings. The PET bottles used for drinks in Taiwan and around the world are not biodegradable even after hundreds of years, “so they never disappear,” he says.
After the EcoArk is dismantled at the end of the Flora Expo, the bricks will be used to build another exhibition hall for the Far Eastern Group either in mainland China or Taiwan, but the details have yet to be worked out, Huang says.
For the Miniwiz team, though, the process Huang and his colleagues went through in reengineering plastic bottles into polli-bricks to make the EcoArk has turned them off bottled drinks. “We’re starting to drink a lot less plastic-bottled beverages after we started the project because we know how much waste we have and then we know how much work there is for us, both intellectual-wise and manufacturing-wise, [to transform them into useful products],” he says. “Because we’ve been looking at so much plastic and analyzing how they can be reused, I think people are pretty sick of plastic bottles at the moment,” he says. “These days we’ve been drinking a lot of coffee from our coffee machines and we’ve been buying a lot of tea bags.”
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Cindy Sui is a contributing writer based in Taipei.
Copyright © 2010 by Cindy Sui