I recently caught the end of a news story on ChannelNewsAsia about a foreigner in Pingtung married to a Taiwanese who recycles things to build his own house, teaches people how to make bricks out of paper to build houses, teaches pizza making, has a coffee shop… I didn’t catch any other details except at the end of the story they said reporting from Pingtung county in Taiwan. I apologize for lacking any other info but this is really all the info I caught in the news story.
I don’t have any personal knowledge of it, but the stuff below appears to be about the subject you saw on the news.
Here’s a Chinese-language webpage with pictures, from January of 2014, I think–I guess this is about the same person as the one in the news show you saw:
Here are some videos that I guess are about that same subject; I think the videos range from 11 months ago to four years ago:
About three minutes, NTDTV:
Three minutes:
Ten minutes, CTS:
Five minutes:
Not quite two minutes, China Times:
About 3 1/2 minutes, CTS:
Edited to add:
The man’s name is John Lamorie. Here are some more links:
“Eco-friendly house made of paper,” Da Ai Headlines (Da Ai Television, Tzu Chi Foundation), August 16, 2012
There’s another guy I know making environmentally friendly products and organic pizza in Meinong, very popular also. He also very effectively uses some local organizations and local governments to promote his products and ideas.
The ex GM of HP was interviewed recently, he was one of the first to promote recycling of kitchen scraps in Taiwan to use for organic produce, people thought he was banking mad. He has his farm out in Sanzhi.
I read the papers guy blog/Facebook before, they have had to deal with some unsavory neighbors, it is is pingdong after all!
As in HP Foods, or Hewlett-Packard? It’d be interesting if the former. I suspect those companies do the stupid shit they do because the government tells them to, rather than because they want to.
Ha … I think that’s just people. Do anything good or useful anywhere in the world, and there will always be someone who wants to fuck you over, just because it’s entertaining to stomp someone’s life into the dust and say: “See? Told you that would never work”.
The organic farmer’s name is Pierre Loisel. Here are some print articles on Mr. Loisel, and somewhere in those articles there’s also mention of a National Taiwan University science professor named Wu San-he (吳三和), to whom Mr. Loisel gives credit for his help:
“Pierre’s Organic Experiment: Can Vegetables Cure Cancer?” The Wild East Magazine, January 11, 2015