DA.AI seeks a Buddhist niche in PET recycling

Taipei, Taiwan — Taiwan's DA.AI Technology Co. Ltd. pursues PET bottle recycling from a very Buddhist point of view.

In some ways, the Taipei non-profit operates like any business: It manages a complex supply chain making products from recycled PET, it sells them in retail stores, and has its own in-house research and development department.

But the Buddhism comes in, DA.AI executives say, in what motivates the organization.

Rather than going after profits, thefocus is on charity — supporting its parent organization, the Tzu Chi Foundation, a Buddhist disaster relief organization in Taiwan.

DA.AI was started in 2008 by several business executives who are active in Tzu Chi, and today sits at the center of one of Taiwan's largest recycling organizations.

It and Tzu Chi have a network of more than 8,600 recycling centers staffed by tens of thousands of Tzu Chi volunteers, where each year they collect about 60 million PET bottles.

During an interview at the group's headquarters in Taipei and a tour of one of its nearby recycling centers, staff offered a look at how the unusual organization mixes commerce and charity.

DA.AI started for practical reasons — the Tzu Chi Foundation wanted to help clean up litter and garbage in Taiwan and find ways to better use polyester fiber from PET bottles to make blankets for its disaster relief work.

But it's since branched out well past that.

DA.AI started its own research and development division in 2012 to find new uses for recycled PET. It partners with Taiwanese research groups like the Plastics Industry Development Center on new products, such as using bottle caps to make office supplies.

This year, it got certified as a B Corp., a measurement of a company's corporate social responsibility, just the 10th company in Taiwan to get that status. DA.AI says it did that to benchmark the sustainability of its operations and find ways to improve.

It has more than 60 manufacturing partners, and said it's certified to various standards, like carbon and water footprint levels from Germany's TÜV Rheinland and the Global Recycling Standard by the Textile Exchange.

And its researchers are working on what they call R2R, improving how to take a product already made from recycled materials and breaking it down to use over and over in more recycled products, like their RPET disaster relief blankets.

The organization pursues what it calls a “return on influence,” said General Manager James Lee, one of five co-founders of DA.AI.

“What DA.AI pursues is not making money,” said Lee. “Usually companies pursue return on investment. I invest $10 dollars, what can I get in one year. But DA.AI Technology, we are different, we want ‘return on influence.'

“We are trying to use such kind of eco-friendly products to influence more people to change in their daily life,” he said.

At times an interview with DA.AI goes in directions not typical for a business magazine.

“You give me so many questions,” Lee said, at one point. “I think we have a different way of thinking. Of course this magazine is about plastics, it's very important, but what we are talking about is the heart.

“We try to get more people to have some action to protect our Earth, through various methods,” he said. “Of course now PET is one of those methods.”

DA.AI, which in Chinese means "great love," said it gives 100 percent of its net proceeds to the Tzu Chi Foundation.

During a visit to one of its recycling centers, volunteers from the Foundation are busy sorting and cutting up PET bottles, which DA.AI will then take and remanufacture into products.

The company says its products are designed to minimize environmental impacts. They don't, for example, use dyes to color the fabrics on clothing, so the retail store in their headquarters featured racks of shirts, bags and other products in the natural white, black, green and grey of recycled PET.

Price tags on the products include QR codes that, when scanned on a mobile device, give information on resources saved buying recycled products.

Scanning the code on a blanket shows it was made from 28 PET bottles, for example, saving 1,775 grams of carbon emissions, 454 cubic centimeters of crude oil and 76 liters of water.

Lori Chen, a scientist in DA.AI's research and development department, said one focus of its current work is moving beyond textiles and into plastic products made from RPET, such as eyeglasses, flower pots and foldable stools.

It could use support from the plastics industry in doing that, Chen said.

“I think the plastics industry could help us because right now we develop more plastic products from the recycled plastic bottle,” she said. “So we do need some skill to help us modify the property to do more useful plastic products.”