From Event Waste to Circular Value: The Story of TRASH+ LAB by Return Mountain Design

At the Golden Arc Design Award 2025 Season 3, an international platform recognizing design projects that respond to social responsibility, environmental challenges, and future-oriented innovation, RETURN MOUNTAIN DESIGN achieved remarkable success with its project TRASH+ LAB.

The project was awarded three major honors, including the Grand Prize in the category of Sustainable & Circular Economy Solutions, as well as awards in Public & Social Service Design and Environmental Concept Design—highlighting its outstanding contribution to sustainability, community engagement, and system-based design thinking.

Rooted in the mountainous region of Taimali Township, Taitung County, TRASH+ LAB addresses a problem often overlooked in the design and event industries: the accumulation, waste, and underutilization of temporary structures and materials. Through a combination of shared infrastructure, digital archiving, 3D modeling, and carbon tracking, the project transforms idle objects into a circular, accessible resource—demonstrating how design can operate not only as form-making, but as a long-term social mechanism.

Rather than proposing sustainability as an abstract ideal, RETURN MOUNTAIN DESIGN turns it into a visible, measurable, and participatory system, offering a compelling model for how design can actively reshape relationships between objects, people, and place—especially within resource-limited and geographically isolated communities.

Interview

Q: A short introduction to your team.

Return Mountain Design: We are Return Mountain Design, founded in the Jinzhenshan (Daylily Mountain) area of Taimali Township, Taitung County, eastern Taiwan—a remote mountainous region at an elevation of approximately 1,100 meters, far from major urban centers.

Since 2015, we have been deeply rooted in Taimali for over a decade, building long-term and close collaborations with local development associations, chambers of commerce, and various grassroots organizations.

Since 2021, we have invited designers from across Taiwan to participate in local development projects in Taimali. Our team brings together diverse professional and educational backgrounds spanning design, marketing, planning, and management, enabling us to respond to local issues from multiple perspectives. Compared to conventional design studios, Return Mountain Design is particularly adept at transforming design thinking into actionable strategies for local development—seeking sustainable and experimental solutions within contexts of limited resources and complex conditions.

Our core mission is to integrate design aesthetics and ways of thinking into everyday local life, using the “lens of design” to reinterpret local culture and contemporary issues. We aim to translate local cultures and real-life challenges—often perceived as distant or inaccessible—into forms that are relatable, understandable, and visible within a broader public discourse. By doing so, we hope to serve as a bridge between local communities and the outside world, encouraging people with awareness and agency to reconnect with these places and rediscover their vitality and potential.

Design has long been regarded as a language belonging primarily to cities. However, we believe design is a universal discipline—one that serves everyone and exists to make life better. Through nearly a decade of living and working in Taimali, we have continuously applied design thinking to uncover and analyze local issues, while working alongside community members to collectively seek meaningful solutions.

In 2024, our team relocated to the Taimali town area at the foot of Jinzhenshan, establishing our office on the second floor of the former Taimali Public Market. Through spatial reorganization, adaptive reuse, and the collection and reinterpretation of local historical materials, we are working to breathe new life into this once-thriving market and explore possibilities for its reactivation. Long-term engagement in an under-resourced and geographically isolated region has heightened our sensitivity to the urgency of local issues, motivating us to continuously respond through design proposals and on-the-ground action, while opening up diverse future possibilities for Taimali.

Q: Background information and inspiration behind your award-winning work.

Return Mountain Design: In addition to graphic, brand, and spatial design, our services also include event design and execution, ranging from small-scale forums to large music festivals. As our experience with events accumulated, we noticed a recurring issue: after each event, spaces outside our office would gradually fill with dismantled wooden structures, display racks, and decorative elements. This challenge is not unique to us—many teams involved in events and design in Taitung face similar situations.

Although these items are sometimes shared among different teams, their large quantity and lack of systematic storage and management often lead to people forgetting what they own or where items are stored, resulting in long-term disuse or eventual disposal.

This prompted us to consider creating a shared space where these idle yet still functional event objects could be collectively organized and reintroduced into circulation through a rental system. However, due to the long north–south span and vast geography of Taitung, it is impractical for every user to physically visit the warehouse to inspect items. Relying solely on photographs also makes it difficult to accurately assess an object’s true scale, materiality, and texture.

To address these limitations, we digitized and archived each item’s basic information on our website and produced corresponding 3D models, which are freely available for designers and curatorial teams to download. Users can integrate these objects into their event or exhibition layouts during the design phase, test proportions and visual effects, and confirm suitability before placing a rental order—significantly reducing communication costs and trial-and-error risks.

Q: Please describe the design and/or implementation process of the project, and its practical impact — including functionality, ease of use, efficiency, and how the work serves its users.

Return Mountain Design: Beyond offering free access to 3D model files, this project also encourages users to reconsider how objects are treated. In an era where objects are rapidly produced and discarded, we aim for every item on our platform to be clearly understood in terms of its origin and value.

To support this, we developed a backend database that records the carbon emissions generated during each object’s manufacturing stage. This data is displayed on individual product pages, and once an item is successfully rented, the website’s homepage automatically updates the cumulative amount of single-use production carbon emissions that have been avoided. This allows users to intuitively perceive the positive environmental impact of their choices.

Through this mechanism, circular use of objects becomes more than an abstract sustainability concept—it is transformed into quantifiable and perceivable outcomes, strengthening users’ sense of participation and identification with sustainable action.

From a practical standpoint, based on multiple rental trials, we found that using rented objects for events or exhibitions can reduce design and production costs by an average of approximately 80%. This offers critical support for teams with limited budgets and short project timelines. At present, this model is particularly suitable for short-term events lasting up to five days. Moving forward, we will continue to explore more viable applications and support mechanisms for mid- to long-term exhibitions and permanent installations.