Recycling systems in Seoul, South Korea, focus on resident
education, incentives and enforcement to achieve the city’s two-
thirds recycling target. The world is at war over natural
resources. In the past three decades, one-third of the planet’s
natural resources base has been consumed, as cited in Natural
Capitalism (1991) by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter
Lovins. This is not just an issue for environmentalists but a
global problem that calls us to take action. After completing a
month of my internship at the Seoul City Hall Resource and
Recirculation Management Division in South Korea, I had quite an
eye-opening experience. I visited recycling facilities, resource
recovery centers, incineration facilities and resource centers
to observe and record how Seoul is managing to recycle about
two-thirds of its residential waste. For comparison purposes,
the United States’ percentage of waste recycled, as noted by the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “Municipal Wastes in the
United States: 2009 Facts