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Bottles reborn as blankets for use in disaster zones

A worker stacks blankets made from recycled plastic bottles at the Buddhist Compassionate Relief Tzu Chi Foundation building in Taipei on Wednesday. PHOTO: REUTERS

A plastic bottle thrown into a Taipei recycling bin could be reincarnated as a blanket to warm disaster victims in any of 20 countries, thanks to a unique project by the world’s largest Buddhist charity.

The Buddhist Compassionate Relief Tzu Chi Foundation has been taking plastic bottles from the waste stream of Taipei for three years and converting them into about 244,000 polyester blankets intended for disaster zones.

This week, Tzu Chi expanded its recycling effort to begin making shirts, scarves and cloth shopping bags. Based on an idea developed by a Taiwanese entrepreneur, Tzu Chi sends the plastic bottles to a factory that breaks them down into a polyester fabric, which is then sent to a crew of volunteers who fashion it into blankets or garments.

Tzu Chi, a private group founded in 1966, has sent volunteers with relief supplies to some of the world’s biggest disasters, including Hurricane Katrina in the US in 2005 and last year’s devastating Sichuan earthquake in China.

When Typhoon Morakot flooded Taiwan in August, killing more than 700 people, Lee Kui-yang and four family members found all blankets in their one-story house soaked after they were stranded for four days on the roof.

Tzu Chi gave them a dry blanket made from recycled bottles.

“Initially every cotton blanket and even our clothes were soaked in the floodwater, so when we got Tzu Chi’s blanket, it warmed our heart,” Lee said.

Some of the new shirts, scarves and bags will go directly to disaster areas. Others will be sold locally to pay for other kinds of disaster relief work.
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