Recycling

To accommodate over 48 million people living in an area slightly larger than Indiana, the South Koreans have mandated recycling in their country and they take it very seriously. When we moved into our apartment, we have an entire page detailing the procedures and we were cautioned that if we did not follow the rules, our actions would reflect poorly on the apartment complex.
Practically everything can be recycled here - all plastics, styrofoam, metal, glass, and paper. Food waste goes into a separate container and may be collected in a special bag. We just use leftover ziplock bags and freeze the bags each night until they are full. Ziplock bags probably aren’t the best solution but at least we are reusing them. The remaining garbage goes into yet another special bag that can be purchased at the grocery store. By the time everything is sorted, there isn’t much garbage. For us, it’s mainly diapers and without a dryer I’m not even going to consider cloth diapers here.
Every Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, the recycling for the entire complex is brought out and sorted. The pictures above are the before and after piles – I don’t know why the “after” picture continues to get rotated when I updated it - sorry. It’s truly amazing. I have a greater consciousness of what gets thrown out and I try to reduce waste by using less paper towels, etc.