【Nantou Youth: The Midas Touch 2.0】
Proposer: Hsiao Ya-tsen
Project: Tealand Ash-talk: Agricultural Product Translation & Tea Culture Sustainability Action
"After a tea leaf falls, can it continue to tell its story?" Using design as a medium, this project initiates a gentle yet proactive cultural translation for Nantou’s profound tea industry. By recycling tea ash and residues—often overlooked during the tea-making process—and combining them with recycled paper from local elementary schools, we have developed a unique hand-copying craft. The result is "Tea Paper" packaging that carries both local memory and aesthetic texture, transforming by-products into a vessel for the land's stories.
🚀 Project Highlights:
Material Innovation: Developing recycled hand-pulped paper packaging using tea ash, tea residues, and waste paper.
Collaborative Ecosystem: Connecting tea farmers, designers, schools, and community partners for co-creation.
Educational Kits: Designing cultural experience kits that embody both sustainability and educational value.
Grassroots Learning: Guiding children to understand their hometown’s tea culture and the value of the land through hands-on practice.
🍵 Why Start with "Tea Ash"?
Nantou is Taiwan’s premier tea region, yet it faces the dual pressures of market competition from low-cost imports and a generational gap in the industry. While most farmers excel at tea production, they often have limited access to branding and packaging design. Furthermore, the tea ash generated during production has long been dismissed as useless secondary waste.
Proposer Hsiao Ya-tsen, with her long-term commitment to local work in Nantou and her background in professional design, seeks to transform these "ignored materials" into a packaging language rich in cultural identity and sustainable spirit. By allowing waste to be reinterpreted and rediscovered, this is more than a packaging experiment—it is a cultural movement rooted in the tea countryside:
Empowering Farmers: Helping tea farmers strengthen their market presence with more narrative-driven packaging.
Sustainable Loop: Establishing a feedback-oriented and shared local circular model.
Rooting Culture: Helping Lugu’s tea culture take deeper root and be seen by the world again.
