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| Jeju Clean Energy, which recycles vinyl and plastic waste on Jeju Island by incinerating the waste to produce fuel, stopped receiving waste in September 2019 because the company could no longer manage the increasing amount. Korea Times file |
By Ko Dong-hwan
To cope with mounting local plastic wastes, the Korean central government put a break to importing several plastic waste categories mostly used in the country, Tuesday.
Effective immediately, the Ministry of Environment announced revised legal orders that stated the country no longer imports PET, PE, PP and PS.
The sudden mandate came as locally produced wastes under those categories have been collected so much that it was now more imminent to recycle them than importing additional plastic wastes.
Resources Circulation Policy Division official Lee Yong-ki from the ministry said, "To protect environment and public health, it was necessary to limit importing plastic wastes that can be replaced with locally produced ones."
The country has been seeing a steady increase in the amount of the four imported plastic waste categories in the past few years. The total amount in 2016 was 33,000 tons and annually increased to 40,000, 120,000 and, in 2019, to 144,000 tons.
The country has been importing more plastic wastes because locally produced wastes weren't enough to meet the domestic demands for recycling businesses.
The demand stopped at the start of COVID-19 outbreak early this year. Local plastic wastes started piling up because amid fear of getting infected with the disease, people started preferring single-use plastic products, like beverage drink cups provided at millions of coffee shops in the country, instead of multi-use products.
With the rapid increase in trashed plastic wastes locally, together with those kept getting brought in from overseas, collection of local plastic wastes began to encounter challenges nationwide, according to the ministry.
The other reason behind the halted plastic imports was that the country has been seeing increasing local plastic products that are transparent in color, which can be more easily recycled than colored ones. The country saw more colored plastic wastes before. In 2015, out of 247,000 tons of local plastic wastes, 58 percent was transparent. That rate rose to 72 percent in 2018 and 78 percent in 2019.
As the country began to reject foreign plastic wastes, Lee said the government will come up with further measures to make local plastic wastes better in quality so that local recycling companies wouldn't run out of good materials for their products.
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