Iinsect shells, rice husks, water bottles, and bamboo charcoal may not be the first things that come to mind when you think of high-performance building products. But Taiwanese bike upgrade company Miniwiz uses them to do just that. “We take leftover construction waste, leftover trash, leftover plastic or packaging waste, and turn that into a building material that you can use for another 30 years,” said CEO Arthur Huang.
Carbon emissions from the built environment include “active” carbon produced through lighting and ventilation, as well as “integrated” or “embedded” carbon, created during material extraction, manufacturing, and transportation. Embedded carbon is expected to contribute to nearly half of new construction emissions between 2020 and 2050.
“We're solving the carbon footprint problem embedded in dumb logic,” Huang said. “You're using the carbon you've already produced.”
Read more: How the Cement Industry Creates Carbon-Free Building Materials
The mining and extraction of materials for the modern construction industry consumes a lot of carbon, but Huang believes that we can offset the carbon emissions from the production of new materials by using materials that we would otherwise throw away.
Miniwiz has developed processes to transform more than 1,200 types of local waste into building products that can serve as everything from brick or wall panels to tiles and air filters; since its founding in 2005, Miniwiz has built a number of large buildings including the earthquake and fireproof Taipei EcoARK, built from over 1.5 million PET bottles, and Anything Butts, a modular building made from recycled cigarette butts. Recent projects such as the wall fabric in Hong Kong's AIRSIDE shopping mall built in 2023 reduce carbon emissions by more than 70% compared to traditional materials, according to the CO of Miniwiz.2 Summary of carbon emissions.
Concrete, one of the most widely used traditional building materials, contributes up to 8% of the total annual output. Wen-yi Kuo, founder of material development company LOTOS, is working to reduce carbon emissions by extending the life of concrete, and eventually hopes to replace the material with local waste-based alternatives.
Kuo has developed a product that will help deal with the dampness of toll roads that can take over buildings in Taiwan. Natural stucco, made from waste sludge mined in Taiwan's waters, can replace cement-based alternatives. The material prevents water damage to concrete structures and can be added to cement mortar as a waterproofing agent.
He went on to create C-Slurry, a concrete facility that uses industrial waste such as blast-furnace slag from steelmaking instead of cement as a binder, combining other types of local waste such as oyster shells and demolishing red brick to create an alternative. low carbon building materials.
“If we want to be low-carbon and circular, most building materials must be local,” said Kuo. “This has the added benefit of reducing carbon emissions from transport and transportation.”
Persuading customers to try something new in Taiwan's “conservative” construction industry is a challenge, Kuo says. “We're introducing new technology to help solve people's problems, and building trust from there.”
“Ultimately it depends on whether the person has the knowledge and is willing to pay for this,” added Miniwiz's Huang. “So we're using technology to find a way to produce at half the price, twice as good.”
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