A Waste Facility as a Bibliothek? TCC DAKA Wins Green GOOD DESIGN and Diamond Green Building Honors

Can essential industrial infrastructure be functional, sustainable—and beautiful at the same time?

TCC Group Holdings’ DAKA Renewable Resource Recycling Center at its Hoping Plant in Hualien is offering a new answer. The Center has received the 2026 Green GOOD DESIGN Award in the Green Architecture category and was recently awarded Taiwan’s highest-level Diamond Green Building Label, recognizing both its environmental performance and its approach to reimagining industrial infrastructure.

As Taiwan’s first demonstration facility to co-process municipal solid waste using the high temperatures of a cement kiln, the TCC DAKA Renewable Resource Recycling Center was described by Green GOOD DESIGN in its official award citation as a “Living Lab” where architecture, culture and nature coexist. The organizers noted that the project goes beyond a conventional industrial facility, transforming essential waste-treatment infrastructure into an opportunity for public engagement and making industry more transparent, beautiful and socially beneficial.

The Diamond Green Building Label is the highest level of Taiwan’s Green Building certification. Its assessment covers four major dimensions—ecology, energy conservation, waste reduction and health—and evaluates nine indicators, including biodiversity, greenery, site water retention, daily energy conservation, CO₂ reduction, construction waste reduction, indoor environment, water resources, and sewage and waste improvement.

While the Diamond Green Building Label evaluates building performance through quantitative environmental indicators, the U.S.-based Green GOOD DESIGN Award takes a broader international design perspective. Beyond carbon reduction, energy efficiency and resource circularity, it considers innovation, aesthetics, functionality, quality of life, economic viability, and a project’s relationship with nature, culture and society. Together, the two honors recognize the Center from complementary perspectives—its measurable environmental performance and its broader design value—demonstrating how a waste-treatment facility can be reimagined as part of the public realm.

Taiwanese design and lifestyle publication Shopping Design previously featured the Center with the question, “Turning a Waste-Treatment Facility into a Bibliothek?” The publication highlighted how opening industrial facilities to the public and reconnecting them with local communities can make waste treatment and sustainability more visible and easier to understand. Online visitors have also compared the Center with Copenhagen’s internationally renowned CopenHill, praising the architectural quality of both facilities.
The Center is part of a broader transformation TCC began in Hualien in 2020, when it opened parts of its Hoping Cement Plant to the public and established TCC DAKA. What was once a closed industrial site has since evolved into a gateway for visitors to explore industrial transformation, the circular economy and ecological conservation. This open-factory approach has since expanded to Hoping Industrial Eco-port and Hoping Power Plant, both of which have been certified as Environmental Education Facilities and Field（EEFF）. Hoping Industrial Eco-port has also been recognized as an Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measure (OECMs), demonstrating how an operating industrial site can contribute to biodiversity conservation.

Within the DAKA Renewable Resource Recycling Center, the Nautilus Bibliothek creates a space for exploring knowledge across Eastern and Western civilizations, while the Fern Garden supports the conservation of rare plant species. Together, these initiatives are gradually transforming Hualien’s Hoping area into an open ecological and circular industrial ecosystem—one that people can enter, understand and experience firsthand. Since opening to visitors in November 2025, the TCC DAKA Renewable Resource Recycling Center has welcomed delegations from Taiwan and around the world, while companies have also chosen the site for full-day sustainability learning programs. 

By opening the doors of an operating industrial facility, TCC invites visitors to see firsthand how industry, nature and local communities can coexist—and how infrastructure traditionally kept out of sight can become a place for learning, participation and connection. 

Visitors are welcome to book a visit and embark on their own journey through the Nautilus Bibliothek.
https://www.tccdaka.com/tw/bookingPlanRRRC.html