Seoul's volume of household waste handled by private operators has surged this year, as public incineration capacity failed to keep pace with a ban on sending household waste directly to landfills in the greater Seoul area that took effect in January. With waste that public facilities cannot process flowing to private operators, concerns are emerging that the so-called local disposal principle — under which each region takes responsibility for treating the household waste it generates — could be undermined.
Private handling of household waste collected in volume-rate garbage bags averaged 457 tons a day in the first half of this year, up 3.2-fold from a daily average of 141 tons last year, according to data the Seoul Metropolitan Government submitted to the office of Rep. Park Jung-hyun of the Democratic Party of Korea, a member of the National Assembly's Public Administration and Security Committee, on the 13th. Private handling volumes are tallied based on waste processed at incineration and recycling facilities run by private companies rather than public facilities operated by local governments.
Public handling by the city, by contrast, fell 313 tons to a daily average of 2,166 tons from 2,479 tons. Public landfill volumes dropped 393 tons to 165 tons from 558 tons because of the direct landfill ban, while public incineration rose 80 tons to 2,001 tons from 1,921 tons. As a result, the private share climbed to 17.4% from 5.4%, while the public share fell to 82.6% from 94.7%.
Some warn that if the practice of outsourcing waste treatment to private operators outside a jurisdiction becomes entrenched, the erosion of the local disposal principle could create problems in other regions similar to those in the greater Seoul area. The share of waste generated in Seoul but treated elsewhere has been rising steadily. The share of Seoul's mixed household waste treated outside the city rose 13.9 percentage points to 44.7% in 2024 from 30.8% in 2017, according to the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment's national survey of waste generation and treatment. Waste volumes are increasing while the expansion of public treatment facilities to handle them has been slow.
Seoul's mixed household waste generation rose 21.1% to a daily average of 3,434 tons in 2024 from 2,836 tons in 2017. Utilization rates at existing public incinerators, meanwhile, have mostly declined. Among the city's five public incineration facilities, the utilization rate at the Nowon resource recovery facility fell to 62.4% as of July this year from 74.0% in 2017, while the Gangnam facility slipped to 87.6% from 91.4% and the Mapo facility to 76.2% from 81.3%. The city is pursuing modernization of existing facilities but has struggled to expand public incineration capacity because of resident opposition and disputes over siting.
Bae Jae-geun, a professor of environmental engineering at Seoul National University of Science and Technology, stressed that the government needs to expand public treatment facilities and strengthen oversight of the final disposal routes for waste contracted out to private operators so that the greater Seoul area's waste treatment burden is not shifted onto other regions.