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No cities stepping up to offer alternative landfill sites amid rising waste problem
Household trash bags and other industrial waste are being dumped at Sudokwon Landfill in Incheon. Korea Times file
By Ko Dong-hwan
By Ko Dong-hwan
Despite the Korean central government's months-long search for a city to oversee an alternative landfill to replace the current one in Incheon which is nearing the facility's maximum capacity, no city has stepped up.
The Ministry of Environment, the city governments of Seoul and Incheon and Sudokwon Landfill Site Management Corp. that oversees the landfill site's collection of waste from Seoul, Incheon and Gyeonggi Province launched an ad in May looking for a city that would volunteer for the new landfill operation job. The ad ran until July 9, with qualifications for candidate cities eased from the previous ad. The ad, however, failed to find any candidate cities interested in the task.
The authorities had launched a similar ad in January which ran until April. Qualifications for candidate cities included having a site for an entirely new landfill facility with an area of at least 2.2 square kilometers with a ground area of at least 1.7 square kilometers to hold collected waste, a facility where construction waste and household trash can be sorted and consent from at least 70 percent of residents of the candidate city.
After the first ad saw no candidates, the authorities lowered the bar for the second ad. The minimum required area for the new landfill site was lowered to 1.3 square kilometers, and the minimum ground area for holding waste was lowered to 1 square kilometer. Candidate cities also weren't required to have a waste-sorting facility or collect any consent from local residents.
The authorities said it may have been unrealistic to find any candidate city that was large enough to have as much as 1.3 square kilometers of unused land for use as a landfill.
They added they will not run the ad a third time, assuming it won't attract any candidates.
But rather than giving up altogether, authorities have decided to introduce an additional measure to drastically reduce the amount of incoming waste at the Sudokwon Landfill.
Starting in 2026, authorities are looking to stop construction waste from being dumped at the landfill. Construction waste accounts for a significant amount of the accumulated waste there. In 2019, some 1.45 million tons of construction waste was deposited at the landfill, accounting for 50 percent of the total waste collected there.
Authorities said they had already informed the operators of construction waste treatment facilities ― which collect the waste for processing before dumping it in landfills ― about the future ban. Some operators in the industry also started increasing the production amount of recyclable construction aggregates to create less waste.
On July 6, the ministry introduced another measure to lower the volume of heaping waste at Sudokwon Landfill. The regulation stated that starting in 2026, disposed household trash bags collected from Seoul, Gyeonggi Province and Incheon that were not incinerated or sorted out as recyclable materials will be banned from being dumped in the landfill. Other household waste collected from the rest of the country will be subject to the same regulation starting 2030.
The measures are being introduced to manage the rising household waste at the landfill. In 2019, some 780,000 tons of household trash bags were collected, accounting for 27 percent of the entire waste there. The trash, once incinerated, would be reduced to as low as 10 percent of its original volume, the ministry had said.
Sudokwon Landfill, located in western Incheon and some 40 kilometers away from Seoul, is expected to max out its capacity in five years if the current volume of dumping is maintained.