The upcycling, zero waste firm eliminating waste from the design world
South China Morning Post
Apr 2nd, 2019
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, as the old saying goes. It is something Arthur Huang has truly taken to heart.
The gregarious 41-year-old CEO of Taiwanese firm MINIWIZ is on a mission to make zero waste the new standard in design and construction. And he has a library of 1,200 objects made from cigarette butts, plastic bottles, old clothes and other discarded materials to show for it.
“The challenge before was there was no material data for post-consumer waste,” says Huang, who founded MINIWIZ in 2005. Nobody knew exactly what could be done with different kinds of objects and few people were able to trace the impact of turning something old into something new. Now that Huang has 14 years of data from his company’s own work, he says the numbers speak for themselves.
Based on a life-cycle analysis of Miniwiz’s projects, the carbon footprint of using recycled materials is always much lower than using new materials – “often 90 per cent lower”, Huang says.