34 Opinion
The Rise of SuperBin
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
September 2021
COMMUNITY
By William Urbanski
◀ SuperBin machines are in various locations in Gwangju. Visit www.superbin.co.kr to download the app and find out where.
W
hen I was a boy in Canada, certain convenience stores had marvelous machines outside that resembled giant slot machines. Inserting empty recyclable aluminum pop cans into a special slot would activate the reels of the slot machine, and if they came up as a jackpot, you would win a certain prize like an ice cream or another can of pop. Besides unwittingly grooming adolescents to become future gamblers, these machines also got kids excited about recycling, to say the least. As I recall, I was not the only kid on my soccer team who begged his mom to take him to the recycling machine with the faint hope of winning a sugary snack. This initiative took place roughly in the early 1990s, just around the time that Canada began to ramp up its domestic recycling program as the country as a whole was coming to terms with the fact that recycling was not just a nice, optional thing to do, but an absolute necessity. In the last ten or so years in Korea, I have seen some big improvements in recycling programs and generally a greater overall awareness of the importance of the three Rs (recycling, reducing, and reusing), but after moving to a new area of the city, I am happy to report that the future of beverage container recycling is now because SuperBin has arrived in Gwangju. PRETTY, PRETTY PLEASE, DO NOT EVER THROW A BOTTLE IN THE GARBAGE. Around the world, there are many interesting systems that encourage people to never throw away a bottle, and I would like to talk about two in particular: Ontario,
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Canada, and Germany. In Ontario, all alcohol bottles can be returned to a retailer for a refund that ranges between ten and twenty-five cents. Given the Canadian tendency to consume, ahem, bountiful amounts of booze, these refunds add up so quickly that to toss bottles away (or more aptly, place them in the recycling bin) instead of bringing them to the store is literally throwing money away. Besides ensuring that virtually all alcohol bottles are brought back to be used again, this has some interesting social ripple effects. One positive one is that school classrooms and often sports teams (among other groups) routinely hold “bottle drives” in which kids go around asking for people to donate their empty bottles. After the bottles are refunded, the money is used for school supplies, jerseys, or whatever. On the other side of the social spectrum, certain individuals use recycling days (the days on which households put their recyclable materials by the road so that they will be collected) to walk the streets collecting booze bottles as a means to earn some quick cash. This may sound like a hard way to make money, but if done properly, it is not difficult to collect a hundred beer cans, which equals a quick ten bucks. I even knew one garbage man who set aside all the booze bottles people would throw away and at the end of his shift would stop by the store, return them, and make himself and extra couple of dollars. Brilliant! On a side note, some cities, including my hometown, actually have “anti-scavenging laws” to discourage this kind of behavior because it is seen as an invasive nuisance. More on that later.
2021-08-26 �� 10:36:59
