Singaporean environmentalists visit Korea to study recycling, waste management
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
