A total of 1.52 million recycled plastic bottles used to build a pavilion at the Taipei International Flora Expo will be taken apart and sent to elementary schools nationwide to raise environmental awareness, the building’s sponsor said yesterday.
The Far Eastern Group, commissioned by the Taipei City Government to build the EcoARK — a boat-shaped exhibition hall made of PET bottles — said it would work with the Ministry of Education to distribute the bottles to 100 elementary schools for “green use.”
Schools that were damaged by Typhoon Morakot in 2009 will be given priority, group chairman Douglas Hsu (徐旭東) said.
He said all the honeycomb-shaped PET bricks used to build the EcoARK will be reused in creative projects so local communities can join in on the environmentally friendly action.
For instance, he said, the bricks can be reassembled into bus stops, greenhouses, galleries or even sheds for keeping livestock.
“Since the bottles were collected from the public, we think it is best that the materials go back into the hands of the people,” Hsu said.
The group said the inspiration for EcoARK came from the large number of PET bottles recycled in Taiwan every year — about 90,000 tonnes.
EcoARK, also known as the Pavilion of New Fashion, attracted more than 2 million visitors at the expo. It was featured on the National Geographic Channel’s Megastructures, which was aired in 168 countries in 34 languages, with an estimated audience of 370 million.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫), spokeswoman Yang Chih-yu (楊智伃) and Legislator Hsieh Lung-chieh (謝龍介) would be summoned by police for questioning for leading an illegal assembly on Thursday evening last week, Minister of the Interior Liu Shyh-fang (劉世芳) said today. The three KMT officials led an assembly outside the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office, a restricted area where public assembly is not allowed, protesting the questioning of several KMT staff and searches of KMT headquarters and offices in a recall petition forgery case. Chu, Yang and Hsieh are all suspected of contravening the Assembly and Parade Act (集會遊行法) by holding
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