Buddhist Recyling Center in Taiwan

Volunteer at the Center

The average person in Taiwan throws away 3 plastic bags a day, that is 66 million plastic bags that potentially enter our landfills. An unbelievable 86% of all water bottled are thrown into the trash. Yet, I recently visited a recycling center that is trying to help our environment and find a second life for many of the items that get thrown away. Tzu Chi Buddhist organization (慈濟基金會, literally "compassionate relief") is involved in many environmental, social, educational, and humanitarian efforts around the world. In Taiwan alone, they have 5,000 recycling centers with 80,000 volunteers.  The center deals with many items that most people would assume should be thrown away. For example, they have a station for taking apart audio cassettes into 10 different parts to recycle. They separate paper and plastic bags into different categories. They have a repair room where they fix and sell electronics. The largest thrift shop in Taiwan is at this recycling center and sells items that have been fixed, thrown away or donated.
The volunteers include elder adults, school children, college students, prisoners, and Buddhists who help sort, clean, and separate recyclable materials. People who volunteer here seem to appreciate being outdoors (the center is very serene and beautiful), having a sense of community and purpose, and being treated to a free Buddhist vegetarian meal. Our tour guide mentioned that for many prisoners this is a good alternative to sitting in their prison cells all day. Numerous school groups also come in for recycling workshops where they learn basic sorting techniques and then spend a few hours organizing items. So kids learn at a young age how to help the environment.

Adults clean and sort thousands of plastic bags

One of my favorite parts of the tour included a section where they showed us shards of different types of plastic that they made into blankets and clothes for victims of natural disasters. The blankets were surprisingly soft and it was amazing to see how they could find a use for plastic bottles that would normally be in a landfill for a billion years! This tour was organized by Steven Zhang who is a Fulbright Fellow at Zhejiang University in China studying Practices of Resource Reuse and Recycling of Zhejiang Province Manufacturers. 

Fulbright Senior Scholar Jeff Chen makes power from bike riding

Lesson in recycling for school children