New Materals and Reusable Wood
by Olivia Wang
This time our school welcomed a special guest “Teacher Mark”. Teacher Mark is an environmentalist who is committed to making new products from recycled materials. His company uses recycled materials (cloth, plastic, etc…) to make environmentally friendly materials. And provide these environmentally friendly materials to many different place.
In this class, Mr. Mark shared with us many interesting and magical things. One of them is a piece of environmentally friendly wood. This piece of wood is made of cloth and plastic. Its appearance is not different from real wood. And the special part is that it can be recycled and remanufactured all the time. For example, today you bought a table made of environmentally friendly wood. After many years, the table is full of traces of the years and the tabletop has been scratched. At this time, Mr. Mark’s company can recycle it. They can use the original table, and don’t need any extra materials to make an exactly the same table for you.
Wood is a beautiful material with many uses. Wood is used in many places in Taiwan. For example, you can often see them in various buildings or parks. However, although wood is beautiful, it is also not easy to preserve. When it rains wood will easily grow moss and will crack. Therefore, the government must spend large sums of money to maintain these woods. On the contrary, although environmentally friendly wood is made of cloth, it doesn't absorb water, so it don't have the problem of growing moss in the rain, and it will crack after being used for a long time. There is a big reason why it is called environmentally friendly wood. When you want to replace these environmentally friendly wood, teacher Mark will use the stuff that can be recycled made into new products. There will be no new garbage or waste. Therefore, this product not only saves a fee for the government and the people, it also does a great job in caring for the environment.
Next, the fabric in the environmentally friendly wood just mentioned is produced by putting the clothes in the old clothes recycling factory into a special machine, and after crushing and fusing with other materials to produce environmentally friendly wood, but not all clothes can be used. before putting the clothes into the machine, some of the clothes will be directly eliminated and burned. The reason is that the clothes have zippers, buttons, rivets, etc… that cannot be recycled, accessories. If we want to remove these accessories, then we must to completely manual method to remove them, and this cost is too uneconomical for the factory, so almost no people will do this. Then these clothes are burned, but this will make a lot of damage to the air quality, so teacher Mark is working hard to replace the current zippers with recycled materials, so that all these clothes can be recycled.
In the end, I think what I have learned in this class is that we should keep curiosity and imagination at all times, to create new things as much as possible, not just accept the status quo, take everything for granted. We should think more about “How can this thing be improved?” and “Can this thing be done better?”, we should continue to think about creating better things for the world so that people can interact with the environment can coexist peacefully, help each other and grow.
能夠重複利用的木頭
by Olivia Wang
這次我們學校又迎來了一位特別的嘉賓「馬克老師」。馬克老師是一名致力於以回收物製作新產品的環保人士，他的公司利用回收來的物資(布料、塑膠等……)製作出環保材料，並將這些環保材料提供給各個場所。
在這堂課中，馬克老師與我們分享了許多有趣且神奇的事物，其中一個便是一塊環保木頭，這塊木頭是由布料及塑膠所製作而成的，它的外表與真正的木頭相差不遠，而特別之處在於它能夠一直循環的被回收再製造。舉個例子，今天你買了一張用環保木頭所製作成的桌子，經過多年以後，這張桌子上充滿了歲月的痕跡，桌面已經被刮花，那麼這時，馬克老師的公司能夠將其回收，使用原本的這張桌子，不需要再加入任何多餘的材料便能製作出一張一模一樣的桌子給你。
木頭是一種美觀且有許多用途的材料，在台灣很多地方都會使用木頭，像是在各種建築或是公園都時常能夠看見它們的身影。但木頭雖然美觀，同時也不易保存，當碰上下雨時木頭便會容易長青苔，使用久了也會裂開來，所以政府必須花大筆的資金來維護這些木頭。相反的，環保木頭雖然是布料做的，但是它並不會吸水，所以不存在著淋雨長青苔的困擾，更不用擔心它使用久了會裂開，而它之所以叫環保木頭還有一個很大的原因是，當你想將這些環保木頭替換掉時，馬克老師他們都可以將其回收再製作出新的產品，不會有新的垃圾或廢物的出現。所以這項產品，不僅替政府及人民省下了一筆費用，它也為愛護環境盡了很大一份力。
再來，剛剛提到環保木頭中的布料，是透過將舊衣回收廠的衣服放進特殊的機器，經過攪碎後與其他材質融合才生產出了環保木頭，但並不是所有的衣服都能放進機器中，在將衣服放進機器前，有一部分的衣服就會直接被淘汰並拿去燒掉，原因是因為那些衣服上有著拉鏈、鈕扣、鉚釘等……無法回收的配件，如果我們要將這些配件拆除，那麼我們必須採用完全人力的方式將其拆除，而這樣的成本對於工廠來說太不划算了，所以很少有人會這麼做，而這些衣服也自然就被燒掉了，但這樣對於空氣品質的傷害很大，因此馬克老師正在努力用再生材料去替代現在的拉鏈，讓這些衣服全部都能夠被回收。
我覺得在這堂課中，我所學習到的是，我們應該隨時都要保持好奇心和想像力，去盡可能的創造新事物、探索事物的可能性、不安於現狀、對什麼事都覺得理所當然。我們應該多去思考「這件事還能怎麼改善？」、「這件事是否還能做的更好？」，我們應該持續地去思考，為了這個世界創造出更美好的事物，讓人與環境都能和平共處，互相幫助、成長。