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[Why Korea 22] South Korea Is the World's Top Recycler. So Why Is Plastic Piling Up?

Color-coded recycling bins for PET, cans, paper, and glass in South Korea

While writing my last piece on Korea's food waste recycling rate, I got curious about something else.

What about the other stuff — PET bottles, paper, plastic in general?

Korea assigns specific collection days for sorted waste, whether you're in an apartment complex or a regular neighborhood (I'm not actually sure if the day varies by region). You peel labels off PET bottles, separate the caps, and set clear PET bottles aside from colored ones entirely. Given how thoroughly this is all sorted, I assumed the country had to be doing a great job.

Turns out the real story is a lot more complicated than that.

Korea already has a reputation as a "great recycler"

Let's start with the part that isn't wrong.

In the 2022 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), a joint report from Yale and Columbia universities, Korea ranked first out of 180 countries in the recycling category. The index scores countries from 0 to 100 based on how much of their metal, plastic, paper, and glass gets recycled — and Korea's score, 67.10, was the highest of any country measured. The report specifically credited Korea's volume-based waste fee system as the driver behind this performance.

Number one in the world. On the surface, there's no reason to doubt it.

But look at plastic alone, and the story changes

Isolate plastic specifically, though, and suddenly there are two competing numbers.

The Korean government says it recycles 73% of plastic waste. Greenpeace, the international environmental group, estimates the real figure is closer to 27%.

Same country, same material — and a gap of nearly three times between two numbers. Neither side is necessarily lying. So what's actually different here?

Source Reported Figure Basis
Korean government ~73% Waste that arrived at a recycling screening facility
Greenpeace (environmental group) ~27% Estimated amount that completed actual recycling
Greenpeace & Chungnam National University joint study (published 2023, based on 2021 data) 16.4% Material recycling rate for household waste (excludes incineration/energy recovery — measures only what became new plastic feedstock)

Turns out, they're counting different things

A researcher at the local activist group Climate Change Center told Reuters that Korea's claimed 73% is a false number — it just counts plastic that arrived at the recycling screening facility. What happens after that — whether it's actually recycled, incinerated, or landfilled — isn't captured at all.

In other words: sorting gets tracked precisely. Everything after that gets blurry.

There's a scene that makes this blurriness concrete. At a shuttered recycling site in Asan, South Chungcheong Province, roughly 19,000 tonnes of finely shredded plastic waste sat piled up, untreated, emitting a faint but noxious smell. According to Reuters, the site's operator had run into financial trouble and simply abandoned it. Everyone did their part sorting the waste at home — but what happened to it after that is anyone's guess.

A more rigorous study looked closer at this gap. A 2023 report from Greenpeace and Chungnam National University, using 2021 waste data, found that the material recycling rate for household plastic waste — excluding incineration and energy recovery, counting only what was actually processed back into new plastic feedstock — was just 16.4%. The rest was either incinerated (32.6%) or landfilled (12.8%).

And more recently, the Korean government itself seems to be acknowledging the issue to some degree. The Ministry of Environment has said it's reviewing a plan to exclude thermal recycling — burning waste to recover energy — from official recycling statistics. If that change actually goes through, the current 73% figure would likely drop significantly.

Sound familiar? The "95%" figure I dug into in the last piece had exactly the same problem. Depending on what you use as the denominator and what you use as the numerator, the same underlying reality can turn into wildly different numbers.

And the amount being used keeps growing in the first place

There's a more fundamental issue here, separate from the recycling rate itself: the sheer volume of plastic waste being generated keeps climbing.

Korea's plastic waste generation grew from roughly 9.6 million tonnes in 2019 to about 12.6 million tonnes in 2022 — a 31% jump in three years. The main driver appears to be the surge in packaging from food delivery and online shopping.

As a result, Korea's per-capita plastic waste generation hit 103.9 kg in 2022, the second-highest among OECD member countries — roughly double the OECD average.

Korea was #1 in recycling. It's #2 in usage. Apparently this is a country that ranks near the top in a lot of things.

No amount of recycling skill can fully absorb a volume that keeps growing this fast. As I noted in the last piece too, "recycling well" and "generating less waste" are two completely different problems. With plastic, that gap is much wider.

That said, it's not as if nothing is being done

One choice Korea made in recent years actually reveals what's really at the core of this problem.

Starting in late December 2020, Korea began requiring apartment complexes to collect clear PET bottles separately. A year later, in December 2021, the same rule was extended to detached houses and smaller residential buildings nationwide. Labels come off. Colored and clear bottles are kept apart. Caps get separated too.

This hassle isn't arbitrary. If color and labels get mixed into the batch, that PET plastic becomes nearly impossible to turn back into new PET bottles. Instead, it can only become lower-grade recycled material.

In other words, what Korea has recently focused on isn't "how much do we collect" but "how cleanly do we collect it." Separating clear PET bottles was an attempt to make the next step of recycling — actually turning the material back into feedstock for new products — possible in the first place.

Of course, this alone doesn't close the gap between 27% and 73%. Most plastic still comes in a mix of colors and materials, and sorting it precisely afterward remains costly and technically demanding. But at least the direction is clear now: from collecting more, to collecting cleaner.

Is that actually enough, though?

One thing needs to be said plainly here. Demanding that citizens peel labels, separate colors, and detach caps — while having no concrete target for reducing how much plastic gets produced in the first place — is an odd kind of balance.

Hong Su-yeol, director of the Resource Recirculation Society & Economy Institute, told Reuters that Korea lacks concrete goals toward reducing plastic use outright. In other words: plenty of attention goes to recycling technology and statistics, while actually making and using less plastic gets comparatively neglected.

There are even cases where the country moved backward. In November 2023, the Ministry of Environment eased restrictions on single-use straws and plastic bags — rolling back rules it had tightened just a year earlier.

If the burden of sorting is designed meticulously around what citizens do, while the total volume of production and consumption isn't managed with anywhere near the same rigor, that imbalance falls on one side only.

So, Why Korea?

It sounds like a contradiction at first: Korea is the world's #1 recycler, and at the same time its actual plastic recycling rate might be as low as 27%.

But both can be true at once, because the two numbers are measuring different stages, against different standards.

That's really the heart of this story, I think. When a country says it "recycles well," the claim deserves one question before you take it at face value: what, exactly, is being counted?

Korea's sorting system really is meticulous. The effort citizens put into peeling labels off clear PET bottles is real, and so is the policy that made it possible. But if that meticulousness falls entirely on citizens' shoulders — and if it's unclear what the resulting number even includes or leaves out — that's a question citizens are entitled to keep asking.

Curious about Korea?

So am I.

Key Takeaways

  • In the 2022 EPI (Environmental Performance Index) from Yale and Columbia, Korea ranked #1 out of 180 countries in the combined recycling category (metal, plastic, paper, glass), scoring 67.10.
  • Isolate plastic, though, and there's a wide gap between the government's claim (73%) and Greenpeace's estimate (27%). A 2023 Greenpeace/Chungnam National University study, using 2021 data, put the material recycling rate for household waste (excluding incineration/energy recovery) as low as 16.4% — the figure shifts dramatically depending on what's being measured.
  • Korea's plastic waste generation grew 31% between 2019 and 2022. As of 2022, per-capita generation (103.9 kg) ranked second among OECD countries, roughly double the OECD average — meaning the volume generated keeps rising independent of the recycling rate.
  • Korea's government has said it's reviewing a plan to exclude incineration (thermal recycling) from official recycling statistics — a change that could lower the official recycling rate.
  • Experts say Korea has no concrete target for reducing plastic use itself. In November 2023, restrictions on single-use straws and bags were actually eased — critics note that while sorting is meticulously designed around citizens, managing total production and consumption is comparatively loose.
  • Since late December 2020, Korea has required separate collection of clear PET bottles in apartment complexes, extended to detached houses a year later in December 2021. Because mixed colors and labels make high-quality recycled material difficult to produce, this reflects a shift in focus from "collecting more" to "collecting cleaner."

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