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Stricter Law Helps Boost Taiwan's Green Building Materials Industry

Local manufacturers cash in on eco-friendly trend

2013/03/01 | By Ken Liu

Taiwan's Indoor Air Quality Act took effect in November 2012, bringing more stringent rules for indoor air quality and giving a boost to the island's green building materials industry.

The new law imposes strict requirements for air quality inside houses to keep residents from inhaling hazardous particles such as carbon monoxide, volatile organic chemicals (VOCs), formaldehyde, fungi, carbon dioxide, germs, and ozone. Offenders can be fined NT$50,000 to NT$250,000 (US$1,724-8,620 at NT$29: US$1), depending on the magnitude of their infraction. 

“A person typically spends 90% of his or her life indoors, so hazardous building materials are more threatening to health than smoking cigarettes,” warns C.T. Chen, chairman of the Taiwan Green Building Material Council (TGBMC), a private group representing over 200 manufacturers.

Even before implementation of the air quality law--on July 1, 2009--the government raised the minimum content of green materials in buildings from 5% to 30%. Buildings in violation of the minimums are denied move-in permits.

While threatening the stick of punishment, the government also offers a carrot: the Ministry of the Interior-supported “Green Building Material Label,” which recognizes the achievements of materials suppliers in developing ecological, healthful, high-performance, and recycled materials. Under MOI license, the non-profit Taiwan Architecture & Building Center (TABC) issued over 761 labels covering 5,850 approved products by the end of 2012. 

Over the past few years, the range of ecological building materials available in Taiwan has expanded to include eco-project consulting, non-toxic electrical cables, parquet flooring, tiles, paints, carpets, adhesives, fillers, glass, cushion, and gypsum boards.

City Green Corp. is Taiwan's first consulting firm providing eco-building solutions consisting encompassing building design, green building label application, intelligent building label application, green equipment and system engineering, construction project oversight, and turnkey project planning.

When it starts a construction project, the company works in cooperation with architects, engineers, landscape architects, lighting designers, air-conditioning engineers, electrical technicians, construction companies, building owners, building operators, green-building certification specialists certified by the Leadership in Energy and Environment Design Accredited Professional (LEED AP) organization in the U.S., and specialists certified by Taiwan's Intelligent Green Building Accredited Professional (IGB AP) organization.

City Green uses a four-stage process in its projects: goal management and cost management in the initial stage, analysis of the green value of the project's engineering in the detailed design stage, provision of green-turnkey norms and documents in the turnkey stage, and implementation of green construction and green-function verification in the final stage.

Green Buildings, Green Materials
Major projects that the company has completed so far include refurbishment of the No.2 exhibition hall of the Taipei World Trade Center into a green building, and a “green hotel project” in eastern Taiwan's Hualien County.

Sanyo Pottery & Porcelain Industry Co. intends to promote tiles that use high-definition inkjet printing technology this year as part of its eco-friendliness effort. The company has traditionally printed grains of various natural materials onto its tiles with silicon transfer molds and print screens, a process which it says consumes a lot of material and is unable to provide vivid textures.

Since inkjet printing is a computerized technology, it can produce vividly textured images saved in computers and print evenly on every corner of a tile's rough surface, while saving on the cost of print screens, molds, and paint.

Sanyo was established in 1971 and today is one of Taiwan's leading manufacturers of ceramic tiles. Its product line includes external/internal wall tiles, floor tiles, and homogenous tiles.

The company has been awarded the Recycling Green Building Material Label, as well as inspection certification by Singapore and ISO 9002 by the Bureau of Commodity Inspection and Quarantine, a unit of Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Chen Lin Li Enterprise Co., which was founded in 1995 to make outdoor building materials, highlights its eco-friendly stance by using plastic wood which does not involve wood at all but produces an excellent wooden texture.

The company makes its products out of pure high impact polystyrene (HIPS), which features excellent resistance to erosion by natural forces such as ultraviolet rays, humidity, acid rain, and air pollution. HIPS is a recyclable plastic, saving not only forests but also virgin plastic material.

Nan Ya Plastic Corp., a member of the Formosa Plastics Group (FPG), has released a number of friendly building materials including recyclable airtight window and door frames as well as formaldehyde-free flooring and fire-retardant boards.

The company's airtight frames also save electricity for air conditioning thanks to their good performance in stopping air leakage. The frames are good acoustical barriers as well, reducing the amount of outdoor noises penetrating into the interior by up to 35 decibels. Nan Ya is another Green Building Material Label manufacturer.

Founded in 1979 as a Taiwanese-Japanese joint venture, Chung Pei Paint Enterprise Co. is Taiwan's first lacquer manufacturer to win the Green Building Material Label for its water-based fluorocarbon resin paint, a replacement for VOC-dipped solvent-based fluorocarbon paint. The water-based fluorocarbon resin paint, which was introduced only last year, is also noted for its adhesive durability and zero discoloring.

Capturing Carbon the Natural Way

Lien Cheng Environment Technology Inc., a subsidiary of plastic-processing-machine maker Hao Yu Precision Machinery Industry Co., is promoting its “Seven Plus” series of indoor plant walls and non-toxic wood-plastic composites as eco-friendly building materials.

The green walls capture carbon dioxide and VOCs, and restrain micro-organisms. The composites are 100% formaldehyde-free, nonflammable, and resistant to humidity and insects, and are certified as a first-grade nonflammable building material in accordance with Taiwan's industry standards.

Lien Cheng's executive director, J.H. Ji, says that building materials, furniture, ornaments, deodorants, and detergents are the main sources of VOCs in offices and homes. This is a problem that the air-cleaning capabilities of the company's plant walls and composites can help remedy.

Ta Ya Electric Wire & Cable Co., founded in 1955 and now one of Taiwan's biggest electric cable and wire makers, has been drumming up business in the building materials market since winning the Environmental Protection Administration's (EPA) Green Mark in 2008 with its lead-free PVC wires and chlorine-free cables. “They do not produce dioxin when burnt,” stresses Jack Chao, a sales representative of the company.

Ta Ya claims to be the first wire and cable maker in Taiwan to introduce eco-friendly products, which it sells under its “Green Inside” label. Non-toxic cables and wires cost marginally more to make than traditional products, Chao notes, but says that his company does not price its products any higher in the hope of encouraging the use of these eco-friendly products.

Taising Building Materials Co., another green-certified supplier, specializes in paints which create the texture and color of granite. Its VOC-free coatings are made of various materials including cement, glass, metal, wood, and plastic.

Resistant to high temperature, acid erosion, ultraviolet rays, water seepage, mold, static, wear and tear, and discoloring, Taising's paints also do not flake and firmly adhere to walls.

Another eco-friendly feature of the paints is their increased resin and lower mineral content. Under the company's formula, resin accounts for 85% of the total, a 5% gain over the old formula, while the mineral content drops to only 5%.

According to the company, less mineral content means less exploitation of stone resources and reduced eco-damage.

Kending Enterprises Co. has obtained a Healthy Green Building Materials Label for its low-formaldehyde veneered flooring, which has tested to be health-hazard-free and has been certified by the non-governmental Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) for its forestry-friendly properties.

Besides using hazard-free paints to make the flooring nonflammable and acid-resistant, the company positions its products as upscale because of its unorthodox manufacturing technique—to preserve the natural texture of the wood, its veneers are hand-made.

A TGBMC member, Mosia Flooring Corp. boasts Green Building Materials Label certification and has developed at least three non-hazardous technologies for making building materials. Its sprayer captures VOCs, which disintegrate into non-toxic H2O and CO2. (Testing by SGS shows that the sprayer captures 42% of the VOCs in a cubic meter in 15 minutes, 88% in half an hour, and 100% within one hour.) The firm's parquet flooring is made of bamboo instead of wood, with a patented lamination process that uses thermoplastic polymer as a replacement for urea formaldehyde resin, and carries a three-year warranty.

Local Materials Reduce Carbon Footprint
The company uses locally grown bamboo to make its parquet flooring, reducing the carbon footprint that would be created by importing materials. For the sake of efficiency, the parquet is only 0.35mm thick and is mounted on EPA foam that cushions and is resistant to mold resistant, producing flooring that is durable, cool to the touch in summer, and warm in winter.

The healthful and recyclable gypsum boards made by the Universal Cement Corp. are free of formaldehyde and asbestos, and so have won the Green Building Materials Label.

The gypsum boards have been installed as firewalls and acoustical barriers in many five-star hotels, mass rapid transit stations, office buildings, public work projects, and luxury apartments in Taiwan.

White Horse Ceramic Co. is another certified green-material supplier, making tiles of recycled materials and coating them with nanometer-grade substances. The use of recycled materials help minimize eco-damage from the mining of virgin minerals, while the nano-coating reduces the adhesion index and enables easier cleaning—in fact, it eliminates the need to use water to clean high-rise walls.

Like White Horse, Champion Building Materials Group makes the most of recycling technology in its production of tiles. The company's unique process turns out products containing some 67% of reclaimed materials, far above the 20% benchmark set in the government's green building materials standard.

The use of reclaimed materials, water, exhaust gas, and energy efficiently in its manufacturing operations over the past four years has enabled Champion to reduce its CO2 emissions to an amount equivalent to absorption by 130 hectares of vegetation, and to save enough water to fill 1,500 standard swimming pools a year.