Talking Trash
One of the things I love about Korea is the recycling ethic. It’s a small country with limited space, and Koreans don’t want landfills from end to end. Everything that can possible be recycled is recycled, included food.
You are not supposed to throw away food in your trash. It has to be saved and then disposed of in large plastic bins. I believe it goes towards feeding animals. What we do is keep a small plastic bag in our freezer and put our food waste in that. That way there’s no slimy mess to deal with.
When we were staying on campus, we could throw away recycling at anytime in the apartment block’s recycling bins. However, the norm for apartment complexes around Seoul is to do recycling on a set day once a week. Until that day, you have to keep your rubbish at home, except for food, which you can throw away at any time.
Our day is Sunday, or rather from around 6 pm Sunday to 9 am Monday. You can see the result above in these pictures I took one Monday morning. This is two weeks worth of recycling for two buildings, ours and another one, because recycling day was skipped the week before due to a public holiday. So, this is a bit more than usual the weekly haul.
The guy in the picture at the top is our building’s guard, who puts out the large bags on Sunday and makes sure it’s all sorted properly ready for being picked up.
People throw out other stuff on recycling day as well, and we’ve pick up a few useful items because of this, such as shelving, an armchair and some large plastic containers. The guard doesn’t care because people have to pay to throw out big stuff, like wooden furniture. He’s already got his cut before we cart anything away, recycling it in a different way by giving it a new home.
