Out of many kinds of waste, food waste is one of the most constant and hard to dispose of because of the pure amount of it. For instance, in Korea, 14,000 tons of food are wasted every day. Not a small amount, and to dispose of it, whether by burning or landfill, it takes 800 billion won every year, equivalent amount to build three soccer stadiums. Despite these serious wastes, since the amount of waste did not decline, the Korean government started a severe planning to cut food waste.

 First of all, as common as it will be in other countries, the government used to tax food waste according to the square measure of pertinent building, of the people residing, or if not of residence than according to the purpose of the building and so on. As such standards were claimed to be arbitrary, the government then applied the polluter-pays principle and decided to use the standard plastic garbage bag, meaning that the food waste must be put into a certain plastic bag and then dumped. The government is able to keep track of the waste since people will have to buy those bags. But there still had been complaints, about mainly how hard it was to keep the food waste until the bag was full, or how the ?standard? plastic bag was in fact not standard and is not able to be convertible in other cities. Furthermore, since the cost of the standard plastic bag was not enough to ensure that people reduce waste, the government still kept taxing the apartments by per complex, meaning that the polluter-pays principle was not working very well.

 To solve all these problems, apartments and cities are working towards using the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) to apply the polluter-pays principle for real. Using these chips that are installed in trash cans, people of the apartment can use the trash can by using a card that identifies the person. When the person throws in the trash, it automatically weighs the trash and deducts the money needed to process the trash. Though effective and environmental-friendly, it is hard to furnish such technology since it is expensive. Though the RFID chips had been in use since 2009 or so, it still will take a long time to supply these chips.

 Are other countries facing similar problems? How has it been solved?