A s a captivating island in East Asia, Taiwan finds its balance of tradition and modernity in the complex interplay of nature, technology, and humanity. Vibrant signs and the aroma of sizzling street food lead the way to the heartwarming community of locals. Majestic mountains stretch toward the skies, offering hundreds of breathtaking hiking trails. Along the ports, the rich tapestry of intertwined cultures of food and markets flourish, blending Japanese, Chinese, and Southeast Asian influences—skyscrapers in the capital rise from the horizon, reflecting the blazing sun of a humid subtropical climate. Vibrant festivals weave together Taiwan’s customs, indigenous heritage, and friendly, kind hospitality history. Its impressive recycling efforts, particularly in glass, are at the heart of Taiwan’s commitment to sustainability. Taiwan recycles approximately 150,000 tons of glass annually, driven largely by businesses like Spring Pool Glass. This company transforms waste glass into architectural materials, household products, and art, embodying the principles of a circular economy. Through innovative approaches and dedication to resource efficiency, Spring Pool Glass demonstrates how Taiwan continues to harmonize tradition, modernity, and ecological responsibility, setting an example for sustainable progress.
Our project, Eco-Glass, Future Lasts, puts the spotlight on the work of Spring Pool Glass, a revolutionary Taiwanese company in the recycling glass industry. Located on the environmentally conscious island of Taiwan, Spring Pool Glass transforms waste glass into valuable products that can be recycled again after use, embodying the principles of a circular economy. Through research, interviews, and site visits, our team explored how this company addresses sustainability challenges and contributes to reducing waste, thereby conserving natural resources, and creating eco-friendly solutions. With over 90% of Taiwan’s glass recycled, Spring Pool Glass demonstrates how industries can bring together economic profit and environmental responsibility, setting an inspiring example globally. Ultimately, our project aims to promote a global movement towards sustainable practices, empowering communities worldwide to adopt innovative recycling and resource efficiency strategies.
The theme of “Share and Unite” resonates deeply with our project, as it highlights the importance of collaboration in achieving a sustainable future. Spring Pool Glass unites tradition and innovation by reviving craftsmanship and integrating modern recycling technologies, demonstrating how different practices can coexist harmoniously. By collaborating with international brands like Muji and engaging local communities through DIY workshops, Spring Pool Glass shares its vision of sustainability and connects people to the importance of glass recycling. Our project amplifies this message, uniting global communities through awareness and encouraging shared responsibility for environmental conservation. Through storytelling and research, we serve as the bridge between the art of recycling and its societal impacts, establishing a unified commitment to sustainability.
In today’s digital age, the availability of the internet allows the team to manage information in a more organized and streamlined manner. Shared online resources allow teammates to work on the same document simultaneously, thereby increasing the specificity and depth of our content while ensuring that it covers a wide range of aspects. All members working on this project have access to school and home internet. All 10 members including 2 teachers add up to more than 12 laptop devices as well as 12 mobile phones. The connection speed in our classroom is approximately 10.58 MBPS and the speed of downloading is 2 MBPS. We made effective use of our resources to plan, communicate, conduct research, organize information, edit videos, create the website, and reflect on the project. While we completed most of the work at Kang Chiao International School, located in Xiugang on mountainous terrain, we occasionally faced inconsistent and unstable internet access. Nevertheless, we were able to maximize our efforts through careful planning and collaboration, allowing us to overcome these challenges and ensure the smooth progress of our project.
Throughout the project, the team did not encounter any significant problems or issues that impacted us heavily. If this had to be said, the primary obstacle would be keeping up with the schedule and progress. While ten is not a large number, it is difficult for ten sophomore students trying to survive the pressure of academic and homework commitments to squeeze in time for another huge project.
At Kang Chiao International School Xiugang Campus, the CyberFair club serves as the venue where we collaborate on our tasks and finalize drafts into a complete website. Our club times remain at two periods each week, which adds up to 90 minutes, or 1.5 hours.
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Although this may seem like ample time, we often spend a portion of each session reorienting ourselves to pick up where we left off the previous week. This ongoing process consumes valuable time, which in turn slows down our progress. Additionally, since club time, like any other class, is only present on school days, the team would need to organize winter training events during the break to help us advance our work. Unfortunately, some team members had prior scheduled plans and couldn't attend, which further delayed our progress. This uneven distribution of work meant many members had to dedicate extra time at home to stay on track or rush through tasks whenever we could meet. Despite these challenges, we successfully managed to complete the project on time and maintained a high quality of work. Overall, the minor difficulties we encountered only made us more effective communicators and mature teammates, and we enjoyed the experience of collaborating on this project.
“Our participation in CyberFair has united our community in celebrating sustainability and innovation, showcasing how small, impactful steps in recycling can inspire global change.”
Projects the team had submitted to the International CyberFair Competition have always been different from what we were taught in school; every member was able to investigate topics that we had been interested in but never had the chance to dig deep into. In this case, the team investigated recycling glass and the circular economy. Moreover, the entire website was written in English, which is not the native language of most members of our team. Fortunately, under a bilingual-based curriculum, we were able to use the sentence, paragraph structures, and analytical skills and techniques we have learned in the past junior years to produce a visually appealing website with fluent text and language. This is not only an invaluable opportunity for us to improve our English essay writing skills, but also to apply collaboration, critical analyses, and leadership to our community and help spread awareness of urgent sustainable topics across the world. As a team, we believe the CyberFair project has enabled us to manage time wisely, given that we only have two periods of class each week to complete the coursework. Group collaboration and work distribution became something we needed to put an emphasis and effort on. Throughout the months we worked on this single project, each of our members had distinct works to complete. Everyone approached each task with their style and most honored effort. Our ability and skill to research, paraphrase, and manage information, organize on-site visits, and reflect on ourselves made this project a relatively easy competition and coursework to do. To end, the team thanks Global School Net for hosting such a memorable competition and experience. It is our utmost pleasure to have participated in this competition as a global citizen and international competitor.
