Across South Korea, it is nearly impossible to set foot in a restaurant without being greeted by bowls of “banchan:” specialty side dishes that run the gamut from cooked rice, soup, kimchi, bulgogi, beans, and potato pancakes.
When dinner ends and the check is paid, the sight of half-filled bowls, fermented juices, and fish scraps is the mark of a well-enjoyed meal.
In many countries around the world, those plates would be scraped into a trash can, contributing to the whopping 2.5 billion tons of food waste that is generated worldwide every year.
“It’s one of the biggest — and dumbest — environmental problems we have today,” climate scientist Jonathan Foley told the Washington Post.
But South Korea has accomplished something that many might consider impossible.
Over the course of three decades, the country has created a recycling, trash, and compost system that has allowed residents to recycle 98% of their food waste.
Every night after dinner service, Kim Young-Hee — a restaurant manager in Seoul — takes leftover bowls of banchan and carefully separates it out in the kitchen into a specialty-marked bag.
“Once the service is over we put it in a bin outside,” Young-Hee told FRANCE 24 news network. “We put this sticker on the bin to prove that we paid the fee, then the garbage collectors come and take it away.”
South Korea recycles roughly 5 million tons of food waste a year.
The goal? Divert unnecessary waste and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
At food processing plants, the food is stored in tanks, ground up, dried out, and processed into animal feed and fertilizer for farms across the country.
To get to this milestone, the government began handing out fines for improperly discarded food waste. And that’s not just for littering, it also means getting fined for dumping food waste in the garbage bin (instead of a compost container).
To discourage food waste and promote sustainability, many citizens have a prepaid card that they use to track their composting habits.
“I tap my card here, and it opens,” Lee Seo-Un told FRANCE 24, gesturing to the yellow compost containers and the attached keypad.
With a touch of her card, the top of the bin lifts and she sets her food inside.
“I’m very careful about the food waste we generate, because we have to pay a fee based on weight,” she explained.
Each trip to the machine is a matter of pennies. The average family typically pays around $6 a month to compost.
Even so, Seo-Un said it’s made her more conscious of how she prepares and uses ingredients.
“[We] are very careful about reducing household expenses,” she added. “For example, I drain all the water from the food waste to make it lighter.”
The system isn’t flawless. According to the Washington Post, the wrong items find their way into the composting system, causing breakdowns in machinery (or resulting in less than savory animal feed).
To adjust to these issues, the government has been gradually prioritizing biogas centers more and more, to turn the compost into energy.
The Daejeon Bioenergy Center — just one of 300 centers across the nation — has transformed food waste into green energy that powers an estimated 20,000 households.
And though South Korea’s standards aren’t easy to replicate — or enforce — around the world, the process of composting food waste into energy is one aspect that is turning heads in America.
Biogas systems use anaerobic digestion — a process that breaks down organic waste into a renewable natural gas substitute — and they’re slowly catching on in the U.S.
For every 100 tons of food waste processed daily, those biogas systems supply energy for up to 1,400 households annually.
Currently there are 2,200 operating biogas systems today, but the upward potential is innumerable.
And it's important to celebrate milestones along the way.
This past May at BIOGAS AMERICAS — the “largest gathering of biogas and renewable natural gas professionals” in North America — engineers and industry leaders gathered to discuss the future of biogas in the U.S.
“The year-over-year increases at BIOGAS AMERICAS illustrate biogas’ growing role in addressing the climate crisis,” said Bernie Sheff, board chair of American Biogas Council, at the conference.
“As we celebrate this phenomenal success, we look forward to continuing our work to increase sustainability in the food, solid waste, agriculture and wastewater businesses.”
Header image via Bobby Palm (CC BY-SA 2.0)
