At Japan’s Circular Economy Expo in Chiba Prefecture this week, Taiwan is presenting a tightly coordinated industrial push under the banner “Taiwan Ocean Circular Hub” that signals its intention to convert marine debris challenges into industrial and policy opportunities.
With nine Taiwanese companies displaying innovations—from recycled marine-waste fibers in clothing to other material reutilizations—the Cabinet-level Ocean Affairs Council (OAC) aims to demonstrate concrete advances in sustainability, while simultaneously exposing a series of structural and regulatory hurdles.
Taiwan’s presence at the expo underscores growing momentum in marine waste recycling technology and industrial design. The OAC has expanded its marine debris governance frameworks, notably through the Taiwan Marine Debris Management Platform, which as of March 2025 has implemented its third action plan and coordinated 25 meetings among government and civil society stakeholders.
Among the participating enterprises are Far Eastern New Century (FENC), Sun Jen Textile, Uni-Paragon Enterprise, Formosa Taffeta, Ecomax Textile, Yong Li Biotechnology, Zhongjie Biotechnology, Fengyi Green Energy Materials, and Hightrend Merchandise Corp.
These companies span textile, biotechnology, recycled plastics, and low-carbon design sectors. The OAC has structured the “Taiwan Ocean Circular Hub” exhibition zone to highlight both policy initiatives and industrial innovation.
One anchor of Taiwan’s strategy is Far Eastern New Century (FENC), which has long focused on PET recycling and polyester textiles. FENC’s 2024 report notes that the company recycles in the order of >22 billion post-consumer PET bottles annually into higher value products, including food-grade recycled polyester, filament, sports apparel, home furnishings, and packaging.
Its “ChemCycle” process seeks to address degraded quality in recycled feedstock by employing chemical recycling for polyester-containing garments with mixed fibers, using depolymerization and purification steps to recover usable polymer. Despite such advances, technical limits remain: mechanical recycling still weakens polymer strength; quality degradation remains an obstacle, especially for food-contact or regulated uses.
Taiwan’s policy ecosystem mirrors this industrial ambition, but with gaps in scale and consistency. The Marine Debris Governance Platform has formalized source-reduction, alternatives, interception/removal at endpoints, and research into both ecological impact and policy development.
However, collection, sorting, and processing capacities are uneven across Taiwan’s geography, and many marine debris items have material mixes or contamination profiles that make recycling expensive or technically difficult. The OAC’s alliances—regional, inter-ministerial, and with academic and enterprise actors—are designed to address these modular inefficiencies.
International collaboration forms an important part of Taiwan’s strategy. The OAC is advancing its Indo-Pacific Regional Marine Debris Collaboration Platform with Japan and others, seeking to pool technical resources, co-design standards, and build supply/demand coherence across national borders. At the expo in Chiba, matchmaking with Japanese firms is part of the agenda.
To transform Taiwan’s innovations into scalable impact, several solutions are emerging. First, upscaling chemical recycling and improving feedstock quality are central, as demonstrated by FENC’s approaches to recovering polyester from mixed textile waste. Second, aligning policy to create stronger incentives—extended producer responsibility, deposit schemes, subsidies, or regulated recycled-content mandates—can help internalize costs that currently hinder profitability. Third, infrastructure investment—especially in sorting, cleaning, and reprocessing marine debris—is necessary to match the industrial appetite for recycled inputs. Finally, robust international standards around traceability, contamination thresholds, and regulatory approval (particularly for food contact) will help Taiwanese innovations gain acceptance in export markets.
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