The upcycling, zero waste firm eliminating waste from the design world
- Taipei-based Miniwiz’s portable, solar-powered reprocessing machines take consumer waste and turns it into construction tiles
- It is one of a number of the firm’s showcase design projects that highlight what recovered waste materials can really do
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, as the old saying goes. It is something Arthur Huang has truly taken to heart.
The gregarious 41-year-old CEO of Taiwanese firm Miniwiz is on a mission to make zero waste the new standard in design and construction. And he has a library of 1,200 objects made from cigarette butts, plastic bottles, old clothes and other discarded materials to show for it.
“The challenge before was there was no material data for post-consumer waste,” says Huang, who founded Miniwiz in 2005. Nobody knew exactly what could be done with different kinds of objects and few people were able to trace the impact of turning something old into something new. Now that Huang has 14 years of data from his company’s own work, he says the numbers speak for themselves.
Based on a life-cycle analysis of Miniwiz’s projects, the carbon footprint of using recycled materials is always much lower than using new materials – “often 90 per cent lower”, Huang says.
Last year was particularly fruitful for the Taipei-based company, which employs 100 people. It unveiled the House of Trash, a 4,300 square foot (400 square metre) flat in the Italian city of Milan fully outfitted with recycled materials and upcycled objects.