Food Waste Policy in Koreaby | 14-02-2016 23:40 |
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Hello ladies and gentleman, this is the ambassador of South Korea. Today, I would like to discuss the food waste policy in Korea. Considering the fact that a large portion of domestic waste is food waste, appropriately processing each household?s food waste is quite important. Thus, each nation has policies that fit to their socioeconomic situation. In Korea, where both urban region and rural region are coexistent all over the peninsula, several kinds of policies apply over the nation. Therefore, it is quite interesting to view the contrast. In urban areas, small collecting bins are installed in every small areas. In apartments, each buildings usually have one allocated collecting bin. Residents are allowed only to put edible parts of normal wastes. This is because the city authorities send the collected wastes to a professional recycle center, where the wastes are processed to animal food or soil fertilizers. Citizens are also advised to submit food wastes in rather dry form, as it is easier to process dry food wastes. In places where a lot of wastes are generated (i.e. restaurants), separate collection bins exist. In some kind of schedule, collecting trucks visit each collection bins and transport them to recycle centers. Through this kind of nationwide collection program, most food wastes go through some kind of reutilization process. Rural regions, however, fall rather in a dark side. As it isn?t economically beneficial to collect food waste in areas with lower population density, people usually process their wastes in traditional means. They frequently use the waste in feeding domestic animals. New experiments are being done to lower the amount of food wastes. In many collection bins, RFID tags have been installed to identify how much food waste each households generate. Processing fees are calculated according to the mass of waste, in order to economically penalize those who leave more food waste.   In some cities, new technology that allows food wastes to be crushed into miniscule powders is introduced in select houses. In anyway, however, it is a foremost objective for us to lower the amount of food waste, as it is the only fundamental solution to the increasing amount of waste. |
