Singaporean environmentalists visit Korea to study recycling, waste management
Courtesy of Bereket Alemayehu
By Bereket Alemayehu
A group of Singaporean environmental activists visited Korea last month to learn about recycling and waste management while participating in cleaning campaigns on Mount Gwanak and around Hongik University.
On June 21, the group visited the Mapo Resource Recovery Facility in western Seoul, near Haneul Park. The facility receives municipal solid waste from five of Seoul’s districts.
This visit to Korea was the first international outreach campaign of Stridy, a Singapore-based non-governmental organization that collects garbage and environmental data around the world under the motto of “Making a Cleaner, Kinder World, One at a Time.”
During the visit, Stridy founder Marcel Smits highlighted that Korea is an outlier in that it captures 98 percent of its food waste in a separate collection stream. The waste is then processed into compost, animal feed or biogas.
“South Korea, several decades ago, decided to take a top-down view to eradicate landfills and reform its waste management systems,” Smits said. “Incinerators with energy recapture were built, but more importantly, consumers were co-opted with good ‘separation at the source’ practices.”
He explained how general waste needs to be discarded in special plastic bags, and these bags are priced higher with a levy to incentivize consumers to produce less waste and recycle more.
“Food waste goes into separate bags, also levied,” he said. “Increasingly in modern apartment complexes, food waste is discarded in containers that are accessible only with a special card or tag, so that the container can keep track of quantities produced by the household.”
He also commented on the secret of Korea’s success in recycling and waste management, saying that having a national system clearly helps.
“In many countries, the rules are different from one community to the next,” he said. “That does little to instill routine practices. Also, South Korea has a strong compliance culture. Putting food waste in your general waste or recycling bag gets you a stiff fine. Restaurants are quite disciplined about it to the point of consumers separating their food waste after a dinner. It has become the national psyche. Consumers also know that bones and eggshells are not food waste.”
He said that getting people to pay on a quantity basis for their general waste, rather than charging a flat service fee, clearly gets people interested in recycling more.
The members of the Stridy team got a lot of inspiration out of their visit to Seoul, and the highlight was learning about Korea’s unique approach to and achievements in food waste processing.
Vanessa Tan, operations lead of Stridy, was happy to visit Korea.
“Our trip up Mount Gwanak was great! We picked up a lot of trash. Our Korean friends helped us a lot in the process of planning the events and in the learning,” she said.
She added that the group also picked up trash around Hongdae, which she said was “very dirty” in some places.
“We learnt that there are some places with a lot of bins and some places with no bins at all,” she said. “In Hongdae, there are not a lot of bins, and it is exceptionally dirty, especially after weekend nights out, so perhaps having more bins would be better.”
Tan mentioned that other places around the city were very clean.
“So, it depends on where it is in Seoul, whether it is littered and dirty,” she said. “We would love to learn more about different countries’ waste management infrastructure and share our expertise.”
Stridy advocates for cleaner environments, primarily through cleanups, workshops and talks. At the heart of Stridy’s efforts is a litter collection app that helps users track their impact while making the world a cleaner place. The app lets users log the types of litter they encounter, the amount of litter they pick up and the total area covered, and also shows how much work other users are doing.
Visit stridy.com for more information.
Bereket Alemayehu is an Ethiopian photo artist, social activist and writer based in Seoul. He’s also the co-founder of Hanokers, a refugee-led social initiative, and a freelance contributor for Pressenza Press Agency.