Food waste being processed at Dobong-gu Waste Disposal Facility in Dobong-gu, Seoul. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
AROUND the world, most of the 1.4 billion tons of food thrown away each year goes to landfills. As it rots, it pollutes water and soil and releases huge amounts of methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases.
But not in South Korea, which banned food scraps from its landfills almost 20 years ago. There, the vast majority of it gets turned into animal feed, fertiliser and fuel for heating homes.
Food waste is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, not only because of the methane but also because the energy and resources that goes into its production and transport have been wasted, too.
The system in South Korea, which keeps about 90% of discarded food out of landfills and incinerators, has been studied by governments around the world.
Officials from China, Denmark and elsewhere have toured South Korea’s facilities. New York City, which will require all residents to separate their food waste from other trash by next fall, has been observing the Korean system for years, a spokesperson for the city’s sanitation department said.
While a number of cities have comparable programmes, few if any other countries do what South Korea does on a national scale. That is because of the cost, said Paul West, a senior scientist with Project Drawdown, a research group that studies ways to reduce carbon emissions. Although individuals and businesses pay a small fee to discard food waste, the programme costs South Korea about US$600mil (RM2.80bil) a year, according to the country’s environment ministry.
Nonetheless, West and other experts say it should be emulated. “The South Korea example makes it possible to reduce emissions at a larger scale,” he said.
South Korea’s culinary tradition tends to result in uneaten food. Small side dishes – sometimes a few, sometimes more than a dozen – accompany most meals. For years, practically all of those leftovers went into the ground.
A worker picking up food waste from a kindergarten to be recycled. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
But the country’s mountainous terrain limits how many landfills can be built, and how far from residential areas they can be. In 1995, the government introduced mandatory recycling of paper and plastic, but food scraps continued to be buried along with other trash.
Political support for changing that was driven by people living near landfills, who complained about the smells, said Kee-Young Yoo, a researcher at the government-run Seoul Institute who has advised cities on handling food waste. Because stews are a staple of Korean cuisine, discarded food here tends to have high water content, which means greater volume and worse odours.
Since 2005, it’s been illegal to send food waste to landfills. Local governments have built hundreds of facilities for processing it. Consumers, restaurant owners, truck drivers and others are part of the network that gets it collected and turned into something useful.
At Jongno Stew Village, a popular lunch spot in the Dobong district of northern Seoul, pollock stew and kimchi jjigae are the bestsellers. But no matter the order, Lee Hae-yeon, the owner, serves small side dishes of kimchi, tofu, boiled bean sprouts and marinated perilla leaves.
Customers can help themselves to more, and “people are going to take more than they’re going to eat,” Lee said. “Koreans like to err on the side of abundance when it comes to food.”
Lee pays a price for that: about 2,800 won (RM9.92) for every 20 litres of food he throws out. All day, leftovers go into a bucket in the kitchen, and at closing time Lee empties it into a designated bin outside. On the lid, he attaches a sticker purchased from the district – evidence that he’s paid for the disposal.
In the morning, companies hired by the district empty those bins.
In one processing facilities, food waste is sorted out by hand before bones, seeds and shells are placed on a conveyor belt that carries the waste into a grinder where it is reduced to smaller pieces. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
Park Myung-joo and his team start rolling through the streets at 5am, tearing the stickers off the bins and dumping the contents into their truck’s tank.
Around 11am they get to Dobong’s processing facility, where they unload the sludgy mess.
Debris – bones, seeds, shells – is picked out by hand. A conveyor belt carries the waste into a grinder, which reduces it to small pieces. Anything that isn’t easily shredded, like plastic bags, is filtered out and incinerated.
Then the waste is baked and dehydrated. The moisture goes into pipes leading to a water treatment plant, where some of it is used to produce biogas. The rest is purified and discharged into a nearby stream.
What’s left of the waste at the processing plant, four hours after Park’s team dropped it off, is ground into the final product: a dry, brown powder that smells like dirt. It’s a feed supplement for chicken and ducks, rich in protein and fibre, said Sim Yoon-sik, the facility’s manager, and given away to any farm that wants it.
Inside the plant, the strong odours cling to fabric and hair. But outside, they are barely noticeable. Pipes run through the building, purifying the air with a chemical process before the exhaust system expels it.
The system has had some flaws. There have been scattered complaints; in Deogyang, a district of Goyang, residents of one village said the odour from a processing facility was once so bad that they couldn’t leave their windows open.
But most of the plants nationwide have drawn few if any serious complaints from neighbours. Government officials say steadily improving technology has led to cleaner and more efficient operations. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
