Taipei, like any other city, generates a lot of trash. And architect Arthur Huang has been turning that trash into raw materials since 2006. Huang is the founder and director of Miniwiz Sustainable Energy Development, a company that practices "urban mining;" they collect refuse and process it into useful things, like insulated plastic bricks for curtain walls and iPhone cases made from computer waste, with "100% Made from Trash" proudly stamped on the back.

"The population's going up, the demand is going up," says Huang. "So we need to find a way to make new products out of urban trash." As a demonstration of the company's technical might, Miniwiz erected the EcoArk, a nine-story pavilion in Taipei filled with walls of their POLLI-Bricks. Made from recycled bottles, the bricks are not load-bearing, but seem superior in every other way to conventional building materials: They provide excellent insulation, durability and strength, at a fraction of the cost and weight of a conventional curtain wall system.

Have a look at the EcoArk, and learn more about Miniwiz's urban mining philosophy, in the video below.