Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Waste Management in Korea

A while back I stumbled upon a blog talking about living in Seoul for a period of time. Nothing too out of the ordinary about it at all except for a post about how they handled the trash there. It was really just a genius system to me. In order to encourage more recycling, they put together a system where you have to buy government issued bags for your garbage. In other words you can only use these certain bags that they sell for something like $1 a bag for your garbage. You can use any bag for recycling. So in effect instead of paying the flat rate for garbage like most of us currently do as part of our water bill, you would pay for the bags, and the more you use the more you pay. So the people that never recycle and fill their bin to the brim every week would actually pay more for their garbage pickup than someone like Anna and myself that get by most weeks with one bag of garbage.. wouldn't that be nice. Anyway, they also are using this system for compost, so you can limit your garbage even further by sending organic materials to the community compost heap. I would love something like that here, but who knows how or when anything like that would ever happen. They basically were having serious problems with landfills becoming too full too fast, so they came up with a new idea that is turning out to be a HUGE success. If you want to read more check out some of the links about it I've found. Anyone that has some ideas for how we could make this happen here, feel free to share.

Link1, Link2, Link3, Link4

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