South Korea recycles 98% of its food waste. What can it teach the world?

DAEJEON, South Korea — Starting at 5 a.m. each day, dozens of trucks bring more than 400 tons of stinky, sticky food waste from restaurants and homes to a facility the size of two football fields — which transforms it into enough green energy to power about 20,000 households.

The Daejeon Bioenergy Center is one of about 300 facilities that enables South Korea to recycle nearly all of its 15,000 tons of daily food waste, which can be composted into fertilizer, fed to livestock, or turned into biogas, a kind of renewable energy.

“This place takes care of half of the entire daily food waste that the city of Daejeon produces,” said Jeong Goo-hwang, the plant’s chief executive, referring to a city of 1.5 million about two hours outside Seoul.

Without it, most of the scraps would have gone into the ground, polluting the soil and generating methane — a greenhouse gas far worse than carbon dioxide in terms of global warming in the short run.

When South Korea started tackling this problem 20 years ago, it threw away 98% of its food waste. Today, 98% of food waste is turned into feed, compost, or energy, according to the South Korean Ministry of Environment. It achieved this by banning food scraps from landfills and mandating that all residents separate their food waste from their trash and recycling — and to pay for the service through fees and fines.

South Korea is one of the few countries with a nationwide system for food-waste management. While France made composting food mandatory this year — and some cities like New York have imposed similar rules — few places match up with South Korea.

In the United States, 60% of food waste goes to landfills, according to a 2019 Environmental Protection Agency estimate, with only 5% composted and 15% turned into energy.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says up to 31% of all food gets wasted, which is enough to feed more than a billion hungry people. Food waste is estimated to cause between 6 to 8% of global emissions.

“It’s one of the biggest — and dumbest — environmental problems we have today,” said Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, a nonprofit that evaluates climate solutions.

A typical person creates about 265 pounds of food leftovers every year, according to U.N. tallies analyzed by Our World in Data. A single American produces 304 pounds, compared to 242 pounds for a South Korean. Malaysians top the chart with 573 pounds, while Slovenians produce a world-low 134 pounds.

When they were first implemented, South Korea’s food waste policies were met with pushback from a public being forced to pay fines and fees for their dinner leftovers.

But now, the country’s 50 million people consider food recycling a part of daily life.

Some Seoul high-rises have electronic waste bins that weigh food waste. Residents, who log their waste via a digital card, are charged by the month according to how much they throw out. Others buy government compost bags for as little as 10 cents, and dispose of them in streetside bins. Violators who mix their food into regular trash may be fined.

Lee Jaeyoung, a 35-year-old who lives near Seoul and uses the government food-trash bags, says throwing out leftovers separately has become just like any other household chore. “I get a small sense of fulfillment knowing I’m contributing to lowering carbon emissions,” he said.

Recycling practices also need to adapt to Korean customs — for example, banchan, or the multiple side dishes served with a typical Korean meal that are often left half-eaten at restaurants.

Yun-jung Ryew, the owner of Dandelion Bap-jip, an all-you-can-eat diner in Seoul, offers around 10 banchan as part of a meal that costs 7,000 won, or about $5.

She has tried numerous ways to reduce food waste — and therefore the fees she pays for disposal. She squeezes liquid out of scraps before recycling and also reminds her customers of the environmental and economic impact of wasted food. There’s even a banner that notes a small fee for customers who leave leftovers on their plates.

South Koreans adopted this way of life out of necessity, according to Park Jeong-eum, the recycling team leader at the Korea Federation for Environmental Movements, an activist group.

Plans to dispose of food waste failed in the 1990s, when residents complained of smelly landfills and neighborhoods did not want to host incinerators. South Korea’s population density — more than 51.7 million people living in an area roughly the size of Indiana — made it impossible to build facilities far from residential areas. “So the only option remaining was recycling,” Park said.

But despite all its success in recycling, the government still has not convinced citizens to waste less food. The amount of food waste being created — about 5.5 million tons a year — has not changed much over five years, despite the cost and hassle of residents having to recycle it

The country also hasn’t completely figured out how to best use those scraps.

Sorting food waste is tricky. In the South Korean system, eggs, chicken, and onions can be composted, but their shells, bones, and roots cannot. Disposable cutlery, or even dog poop, sometimes makes it into food waste bins. If too many of the wrong scraps arrive at recycling facilities, they can create mechanical breakdowns that may require up to a year of repairs.

Farmers are not eager to give their livestock feed made from food waste, and are reluctant to sow crops in soil tilled with fertilizer made from garbage due to its smell and excess sodium.

“There’s been cases of livestock getting killed from the feed. It’s also impossible to ensure not a single toothpick, piece of plastic or metal doesn’t get mixed in with the food waste that gets turned into feed or fertilizer,” Park said.

That’s why South Korea is increasingly relying on biogas centers like the one in Daejeon, Jeong says. They reduce pollution and emissions; lessen the pressure on ever-dwindling space for landfills; and generate electricity and heating.

The downside is that they are less efficient in the hotter months, due to lower demand for heating. Last year, a Vietnamese delegation visiting the Daejeon Bioenergy Center went home empty-handed because they learned that a biogas facility would not make financial sense in Vietnam’s hotter climate.

Jonathan Krones, an associate professor of engineering at Brandeis University, said the South Korean system is probably not adaptable to the United States. “The reality is that the low cost of land and relatively low population density, leading to high transportation costs, makes any national-scale waste standards really hard to imagine,” he said.

Ultimately, the best way to mitigate the entire problem is simply putting less on your plate to begin with, according to Krones. That’s “where the real benefits are,” he said.