Taiwanese love soft drinks, consuming 4 billion beverages per year out of PET bottles alone. That's enough bottles, even after being crushed, to make a pile three times the height of Taipei 101. The photo shows PET bottles being processed at the Neihu recycling station of the Tzu Chi Buddhist Foundation. (Jimmy Lin)

When those old familiar songs played by garbage trucks everywhere in Taiwan make their way to our ears, ordinary folks like you and me hurry out to the intersection with bags of garbage in hand to wait for the vehicles. At such times, besides our throw-aways, virtually everyone is carrying a separate bag of plastic containers-of which the majority are plastic soft-drink bottles-culled out for the recycling truck (always just a convenient step behind the garbage truck). Now that separating our trash has become a routine part of daily life, have you ever wondered what becomes of "solid-waste resources" like plastic bottles?

Don't worry, your efforts are not going for naught, as it is now possible to give most solid-waste resources a new life. Plastic bottles in particular, which can be remanufactured into products with considerable market value, are having their usefulness extended through new technologies like "bottle to fiber" and "bottle to bottle."

For example, at the FIFA World Cup this past June, an impressive nine teams sported environmentally friendly team strip made by Far Eastern New Century, the leading firm in Taiwan's textile industry. The original fabric for these uniforms was made of 100% reprocessed plastic bottles. And besides being good for the planet, such reprocessing also constitutes the next major strategic commercial opportunity for environmentally friendly goods from Taiwan.

Stopping into a convenience store on a hot summer's day to grab a cold iced tea or bottled water is an everyday ritual for contemporary consumers. Most of these drinks are packaged in plastic bottles, of which the vast majority are of the PET plastic type known to Taiwanese as baoteping (pronounced bao-te ping).

According to the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), Taiwanese use about 100,000 metric tons of baoteping every year. Given that the standard 600-cc bottle weighs about 25 grams, that calculates out to roughly 4 billion bottles a year. Even crushed flat, they could be piled up 1600 meters, equivalent to the Taipei 101 building three times over! That's pretty stunning.