My early report in last March was about waste sorting and recycling in Korea, in which I reported waste sorting in my residential area and my school. Yesterday, there was a recycling class provided by Gangnam Recycling Center where all the garbage was collected from my area and school.  There, we get to visit the garbage sorting area, learn about the status of recycling in Korea, experience program to make an eco-friendly dehumidifier and painted poster for environmental protection . The junk art works displayed in the yard of the Center looks very impressive (see the pictures).

All of the attendees including me were very surprised to see the big garbage dumps such as plastics, Styrofoam, papers, etc., all of which came from our everyday lives. According to the teacher, waste sorting and cleaning the recyclable garbage before disposal at the level of families and stores are so important to recycling because without such treatment and actions it takes much time and labors to re-sort the garbage.  In particular, we should separately dispose the used batteries because it would create a quite big electric shock to earthworms even though the batteries are used ones.  Earthworms may be killed from the weak voltages of AA battery with 1.5 Volt, which can be considered equivalent to about 200 volt applied to human beings.  In addition, for Styrofoam boxes packaged by plastic wraps or decoration, we need to be extremely careful to separate such plastic from Styrofoam in order to make them recyclable. Such small actions in the family or at the restaurant or at the street can make a big change to make our environment much better.