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A worker stacks blankets made from recycled plastic bottles at the Taiwan Buddhist Tzu-Chi Foundation building in Taipei - Source: Reuters
A plastic bottle thrown into a Taipei recycling bin could be
reincarnated as a blanket to warm disaster victims in any of 20
countries, thanks to a unique project by the world's largest
Buddhist charity.
The Taiwan Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation has been taking plastic
bottles from the waste stream of Taipei, a city of 2.6 million, for
three years to convert them into about 244,000 polyester blankets
intended for disaster zones.
This week, Tzu Chi expanded its one-of-a-kind recycling effort to
begin making shirts, scarves and cloth shopping bags.
Based on an idea developed by a Taiwan entrepreneur, Tzu Chi sends
the plastic bottles to a factory that breaks them down into a
polyester fabric, which is then sent to crew of volunteers who
fashion it into blankets or garments.
"They're faster than a normal factory because they're driven by
kind-heartedness," said lead volunteer Wu Yueh-yin, as more than
100 others cut, stitched, folded and boxed the grey polyester
fabric into blankets and scarves for the next crisis.
Tzu Chi, a private group founded in 1966, has sent volunteers with
relief supplies to some of the world's biggest disasters, including
hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005 and last year's
devastating Sichuan earthquake in China.
When a typhoon flooded Taiwan this August, killing about 770
people, Lee Kui-yang and four family members found all blankets in
their one-storey house soaked after they were stranded for four
days on the roof.
Tzu Chi gave them a dry blanket made from recycled bottles.
"Initially every cotton blanket and even our clothes were soaked in
the flood water, so when we got Tzu Chi's blanket, it warmed our
heart," Lee said.
Some of the new shirts, scarves and bags will go directly to
disaster areas.
Others will be sold locally to pay for other kinds of disaster
relief.
"We don't have a firm goal of how many items to make, as we're not
a conventional factory," said Chen Yi-chun, a Tzu Chi
publicist.
"The most important thing is to make them because disaster victims need them as winter is coming."
