South Korea solved its food waste problem by making recycling irritating

IN SEOUL, temperatures drop to minus 10 degrees Celsius in winter.

But the hardest part is not the cold. It is the fact that one still has to go outside to handle the trash.

There, I drain the water from the week’s food scraps; wet food is heavier than dry, and the city charges by weight.

However carefully I tie the bag, the smell escapes, and the liquid has a way of finding my hands. I carry it downstairs in the dark, swipe my radio-frequency identification (RFID) card at the designated waste area in the courtyard, and watch a digital scale register what my household owes.

Then I go back indoors and wash my hands, irked by the lingering smell.

I do not do this because I care about the environment. I do it because I have to. And I dread it.

There is a joke in South Korean dating culture. When sizing up a prospective spouse, people ask two things: Do they own property? And will they commit to taking out the food waste? Not help with – commit to.

Some married men joke, with varying degrees of sincerity, that agreeing to handle the bin was the single decision they most regret.

More than 30 years after South Korea overhauled its waste system, it is still irritating. But everyone does it anyway. That is the detail the policy papers do not capture.

The South Korean model

In September, BBC ran a piece headlined: “New York has a food waste problem. South Korea has already solved it.” It began moving through international media – shared, quoted, held up as a model. Reading it, I recognised the Saturday routine immediately.

The story was framed as a lesson. Government officials from New York to Singapore have been taking notes. Hong Kong has been trying to implement it. What they are mostly studying, I suspect, is the end product.

They are missing the fundamental point: South Korea’s recycling policy worked because it made an irritating thing unavoidable, and just kept it that way.

Almost everywhere else, throwing food away has been engineered to feel like nothing. A flip of a lid. A black bag that vanishes twice a week. No weight, no fee, no reckoning with the land farmed or the fuel burnt.

This is sanitation. The United Nations estimates that the world wasted 1.1 billion tonnes of food in 2022, even as 783 million people faced hunger.

In the mid-1990s, Seoul’s landfills were overflowing. The government began requiring households to pay for the volume of waste they discarded.

Seoul’s policy archive records the reaction: “The general public did not have a favourable opinion.” The system was inconvenient. Ripe for illegal dumping. Nobody wanted to go outside in January.

What followed was not a plan so much as an accumulation: separate collection, then a landfill ban, then fees tied more directly to how much each household discarded. Each measure arrived after the previous one had stopped feeling new.

By the time I left Seoul, I habitually drained my food scraps without thinking. The system had not convinced me of anything. It had just changed what I did.

South Korea now recycles more than 95 per cent of its food waste, up from 2 per cent in 1995. A family of four pays about US$6 a month. It took 30 years to get here. The bin is still annoying. That may be the point.

Three cities, three systems

In October 2024, New York City mandated food waste separation, explicitly citing South Korea. The bins went out.

By April 2026, the city’s Independent Budget Office found organic separation fines running at about 3 per cent of the level seen a year earlier. Enforcement had been sharply reduced.

New York tried to borrow the end of the South Korean success story. It skipped the decades that made it possible.

Singapore is running out of time. Its only landfill, Semakau, is expected to reach capacity around 2035, and just 18 per cent of its food waste was recycled last year.

In July, Parliament asked whether South Korea-style pay-by-weight RFID systems could work here. Trials had drawn poor participation; high-rise housing and common waste chutes made household charging difficult.

Hong Kong has been running its own version of this experiment. In 2023, the city introduced smart recycling bins across housing estates; residents earn Green$ points, which can be redeemed for items.

In 2024, the city threw away 3,287 tonnes of food while recycling 286 tonnes on a daily basis, making up a recovery rate of 8.7 per cent – an improvement from 6.4 per cent the year before.

Three cities, three models and three results: South Korea charges you. New York barely enforces it. Hong Kong rewards you.

For such dense cities, making waste disappear has always required it to go somewhere else. Frictionless disposal does not make waste disappear. It only makes it easier not to think about where it goes.

Today, I no longer live in Seoul. I would be lying if I said I missed the food waste bin. I do not. On a winter morning, there is something genuinely wonderful about flipping a lid and being done with it.

That may be precisely the problem.

The writer, a former investment banker, is a technology journalist who writes about Asian business, technology, innovation and capital markets. He previously worked at GE Capital and Korea Development Bank group.