BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
In Yeouido, Seoul, Seunghwan Hong spends less than a minute dropping off his food scraps. He taps a card, the lid opens, and the bin logs the weight. Whatever he throws in, he pays for.
South Korea’s food waste recycling rate was 2.6 percent in 1996. In 2023, it was nearly 97 percent. The country got there through volume-based fees in 1995, mandatory separation in 1997, a landfill ban in 2005, and RFID smart bins from 2010. The technology made it easy. But the number that changed people’s behavior was the one on their bill.
New York City made food waste separation mandatory for residents in October 2024, citing South Korea as a model. About 3.4 million households are covered. In 2025, the city managed around 140,000 metric tons of residential organic waste, approximately nine percent of the approximately 1.5 million metric tons generated by households each year.
The methane argument for food waste recycling
When organic material breaks down in a landfill without oxygen, it releases methane, a greenhouse gas that traps more than 80 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Globally, food waste is responsible for about 10 percent of climate-warming emissions. A family of four in the US throws away roughly $56 worth of food every week.
Send that waste to a bioreactor and the methane can be collected and burned as fuel. South Korea’s Daejeon Bio Energy Centre converts 70 to 75 percent of what it receives into energy, enough to power about 6,000 households daily, and more than 340 facilities like it operate across the country. The South Korean government aimed to displace fossil fuels valued at around $170 million through this system by 2026. Running it costs more than $430 million annually in municipal waste management, even with household fees in the mix.
Thirty years of escalating policy
The shift from 2.6 percent to 97 percent took about 30 years, and each step built on the one before it.
South Korea introduced a pay-as-you-throw fee in 1995, connecting waste volume to household costs. Mandatory food waste separation followed in 1997. A landfill ban took effect in 2005. RFID smart bins, rolled out from 2010, added real-time individual accountability to the system. By 2025, 151,934 bins were in use across the country, serving more than 8.61 million households.
“Seeing the weight and the cost of my food waste made me more aware of how much I am throwing away,” Hong says.
NYC’s 9 percent and the gap that remains
New York City has gone a different route: access and enforcement rather than financial accountability. The city installed more than 400 solar-powered smart composting bins across the five boroughs, free to use via a mobile app at any hour. The Department of Sanitation conducted over 60,000 door-to-door conversations with residents and issued more than 63,000 violation notices since the program launched.
Grace Fu, a resident of East Village in Manhattan, uses the bins and likes them. “I love having these bins because it makes composting a lot more convenient,” she says. The rodents near her building are less welcome. “More frequent clean-outs would help,” she adds.
Collected waste goes to the Staten Island Compost Facility, where it becomes fertilizer, or to the Newtown Creek Wastewater Resource Recovery Facility in Brooklyn, where it is co-digested with sewage sludge to produce biogas and biosolids.
Steven Cohen, director of the Sustainability Management program at Columbia Climate School, says financial accountability is what New York is missing. “South Korea’s RFID bins could make each resident directly accountable for their own organic waste,” he says. About 70 percent of New Yorkers live in apartments, which makes the model plausible at scale; that is, if the compliance problem gets solved. “The problem is that most people in this city still don’t separate their organic waste properly,” Cohen says.
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