South Korea recycles 97% of its food waste. Your key: either you pay to recycle or you will be fined

We have been recycling for decades and controversy is still the order of the day. There are studies that have come to the conclusion that we have not fully understood how recycling works, we keep making mistakes with the products that go in each container and, if we talk about plastics, things are even worse. The world recycles less than 10% of the plastic it throws away and campaigns have even had to be implemented to reward good recycling.

And there are problems with recycling in many areas, from plastics to food waste that ends up on the street or in the landfill. In South Korea they also had a problem with this, but now they recycle 97% of their food waste. As? With a payment system for recycling and fines if it is not done well.

South Korea. Recent studies indicate that around 30% of all South Korean waste is food waste, but that more than 90% of it is separated and collected effectively. Jae-Cheol Jang is a professor at the Institute of Agriculture at Gyeongsang National University and one of the authors of the study, who told BBC that “in South Korea about 4.56 million tons of food waste are processed every year. Of that amount, 4.44 million tons are recycled for other uses, which means a recycling of 97.5% of the remains”.

Objective: avoid landfills. These remains are used for the production of biogas, animal feed and fertilizer, but this was not always the case. It is estimated that, in 1996, the country only recycled 2.6% of its food waste. In the 1980s, South Korea experienced the rise of industrialization, urbanization and gentrification, creating the problem of what to do with waste in a country with an average density of more than 530 people per square kilometer.

Landfills were created near large cities, which mobilized the population due to odors and waste, so a campaign began to end the landfill problem. That led to the creation of a law in 2005 that prohibited throwing food scraps into landfills. The Government went a step further in 2013 with a payment system for food waste by weight.

Pay to recycle. And no, it is not that they pay you to recycle as a way to encourage action, but that you must pay every time you throw away remains. This is a challenge for a country where, culturally, a lot of food can be wasted that would end up in landfills or in buckets. And I say that it is cultural because there is the tradition of banchan.

If you have gone to a Korean restaurant, you will know that there is a main dish that is surrounded by many other dishes such as vegetables, meats or different sauces that serve to complement that main dish, but if you waste, there are fines, as we will see later.

Three options. When it comes to recycling and effectively processing this waste, citizens have three options that vary depending on the region, the district or even between different apartment blocks in the same city. Yuna Ku is a BBC reporter and comments on what the system is like:

• Authorized bags: They are yellow bags of about three liters that cost about 300 won —20 cents— and that, when they are full of waste, are taken out onto the street for the municipal service to collect. There are also 20 liters that cost a little more than one euro.
• Automated system: They are in blocks of buildings and are radio frequency identification machines that allow food waste to be weighed. The user brings a steel container with their waste, places it in the machine and it automatically reads the code from the person’s residence card. This card has the identification data of the home and also a credit system. When it weighs the waste, it deposits it inside and charges the corresponding money. Yuna states that she usually throws away waste worth about 4.5 euros a month.
• Stickers: This is intended for restaurants. These are prepaid stickers that restaurants buy and place on the containers so that the collection service knows that… they have already paid. This is where the real challenge is due to the aforementioned banchan.

Fines. And what happens if you don’t comply? Yuna affirms that the population usually complies (there is the data on changes in recycling habits in the country), but if someone does not dispose of food waste in an authorized manner, they must pay. In the buildings there are security cameras that identify the neighbors and the fines can be around 63 euros, depending on the frequency of the violation.

In the case of restaurants, there are also cameras, but authorities may become suspicious if they see that not enough waste is being thrown away. In this case, fines can exceed 10,000,000 won, which is about 6,800 euros. Yuna comments that Koreans tend to follow the rules due to a strong moral standard and that, compared to the average salary, the payment for recycling is not high.

Challenges. Now this leaves two challenges. In South Korea, 49% of waste is used to feed farm animals and, if these remains are not processed properly, it can put at risk the health of the animals that will subsequently be fed to the population. It is something that has already had consequences, such as the outbreak of swine fever that, in 2019, put several farms in the country at risk and led the Government to temporarily prohibit feeding rations made from food scraps.

On the other hand, in the rest of the world such a system would be more or less accepted depending on the country. Tracing the South Korean system would not be optimal and Rosa Rolle, an expert on food loss and waste at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, told the BBC that these habits would be appropriate to raise awareness among the population. However, he considers that in Latin American countries, for example, the emphasis should be placed on maximizing the use of food, minimizing waste or donating what is left over, for example.

In any case, if these types of measures are applied, according to Rolle “they must be based on solid data for an understanding of where, why and in what quantity loss and waste occurs. Solutions must be based on scientific evidence and be appropriate to the context. There is no one-size-fits-all measure.

Images | review, Foerster, Bobby Palm

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