With smartphone sales around the world running hot, cellphone covers are also in great demand, though the mercurial tempers and speed with which smartphone users go through covers has caused people concerned about the environment to worry that the plastic covers will further pollute the Earth.
XUAN, a digital product design company in Taiwan, has come up with what it says is the solution to the problem after a year-and-a-half of research — a cellphone cover made from paper pulp that can be recycled.
Company founder Huang Yi-hsuan (黃以萱) said she chose paper pulp solely for environmental reasons, adding that the paper cover did not offer much actual protection for cellphones, though it was, to a certain degree, water resistant.
Photo: Chen Ping-hung, Taipei Times
The cover is made from recycled pulp, is environmentally friendly in that it can be recycled and reproduced, Huang said, adding that the company was thinking about producing a series of souvenir covers, with dates of sports matches and pictures matching the event printed on the cover.
Consumers could either trash the covers, recycle them or keep them as mementos after having athletes sign the covers, Huang said.
Huang said that manufacturers were extremely reluctant to accept orders from her company because of the low number of orders and the complexity involved in making the covers, with factors like basic protection, openings for keypads, earphones and power cords needing to be considered.
Huang said that over 20 manufacturers had refused her before she had found her current manufacturer, which is making a trial production run of the paper covers. She added that her product had been the subject of a report by the Japanese MONO magazine and has applied and received a patent in Taiwan.
Huang added the company is also working with Internet illustrators Bread Tree and Hsiao Peng Mei to provide illustrated covers. She said that though the covers are priced at NT$199 each, she hoped to see the price go down to below NT$100 as a result of increased sales.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the