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.
The German city of Hamburg on Oct. 14 named a bridge “Kaohsiung-Brucke” after the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung. The footbridge, formerly known as F566, is to the east of the Speicherstadt, the world’s largest warehouse district, and connects the Dar-es-Salaam-Platz to the Brooktorpromenade near the Port of Hamburg on the Elbe River. Timo Fischer, a Free Democratic Party member of the Hamburg-Mitte District Assembly, in May last year proposed the name change with support from members of the Social Democratic Party and the Christian Democratic Union. Kaohsiung and Hamburg in 1999 inked a sister city agreement, but despite more than a quarter-century of
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