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S uwon is a city where it cherishes and preserves its historical background while showing a refined beauty as a new town with the biggest scale of a lake in a city in Korea. The city is harmonized with the past, the present, and the future and it has been keen to accomplish citizen ’ s sustainable life. As a part of it, they started a project titled ‘ GREEN TAG TOGETHER ’ to manage trees properly in the city this year. More importantly, this GREEN TAG project is the collaboration work with rePAPER ’ s environment-friendly technology. Lets ’ find out the details! Public Plant Management with rePAPER ’ s Eco-friendly Biodegradable Paper! Suwon city decided to introduce eco-friendly GREEN TAG to manage the trees planted throughout the city in a more efficient way. They first considered using a regular tree tag, but its high cost and heavyweight were not approved to be effective. Therefore, they looked for a material that would be harmless to the environment and ensure easy and continuou...

COVID-19 has rapidly spread around the world and it made everyone’s 2020 tough and left great regrets. However, the news about vaccines gave the world the hope that the upcoming year would be different. We, rePAPER, would like to take this time to look back the year and get fully ready for 2021. 1. Catch me if you can! rePAPER’s Advanced Technology – PTS, DIN Certificates, GB-Compliance, and Patents Added As rePAPER has been setting the world-leading standards for environmentally friendly packaging, we took the year as well to prove our innovative technology. rePAPER’s coated paper, REPA COAT, is now proven to have 99.9% recyclability by PTS, and to become nutrients in soil without any special facilities by achieving DIN’s home compostable certificate. In December, we finally received a positive result that our product is compliant with GB standards in China as well. What’s more, the production methods of the environmentally friendly coatings and coated paper are now protected by...

rePAPER’s environmentally friendly coated paper, REPA COAT, is a product certified for having a home compostable property under natural conditions. rePAPER achieved the certificate by DIN CERTCO for proving that the intermediate product is both suitable for industrial composting which requires a bit higher temperature and humidity and home composting with much more harsh conditions. In order to see the extraordinary compostability of the product, we did a simple experiment in our front yard. Normally, a product made of unkraft paper is recognized to be environmentally friendly for its earth-like color. PLA-coated products also have been introduced to be easily composted in the soil. Would these be true? What outcome could we see if we actually plant the products in the garden? Let’s find out the result from rePAPER’s second composting experiment!

  Since 2018, rePAPER has been publishing Newsletter once a month to share the information about the global trends moving towards the environment-friendliness in the food packaging industries, the major changes in policies and regulations of each country and internal news such as achieving certificates or introducing new products. While delivering the information through a Korean blog and newsletter for the domestic users, rePAPER has been sending an English version newsletter to the international partners and industries by email. It not only contains rePAPER’s technology and products that are recognized as the most optimized solution for its recyclability, home-compostability, and thermostability, also gives insight how each country and business move towards sustainability, rePAPER’s Newsletter has won great favors from readers. This time, rePAPER opened a new blog, especially for the international readers! Please check out our new blog and get the news more conveniently!

The Ministry of Environment announced the Ban on Repacking on June 18 th in order to reduce the wasted resource by unnecessary packaging. However, there was strong backlash among the industries and consumers as it did not give a clear guide line on the subjects or conditions. Finally, the ministry decided to reexamine the issue and set the standards with more details. The department organized a consultative body with relevant industries, experts, and consumer groups since last July and released the revised guide line including the specific subjects on September 21 st . The Government is also planning to apply various policies to decrease the amount of packaging waste. Now, let’s find out more details about the ban on repacking enacted on January of 2021! Based on the subject list, it can be understood that the regulation focuses on the reduction of synthetic materials, which is plastic packaging. The Ministry of Environment gives a 3-month preparation period to the industries for ...

  On June 18th, distributors and consumers were put in a great confusion. Articles were released saying the Repackaging Ban starting from the following month practically means that the Government would forbid discount promotions such as “Buy one, get one free”. The article bitterly criticized that the Korean would be the first country to ban on bundle discount in the world. Let’s keep reading to see what this controversial law exactly is and the true intention for it!   Why Ban on Repackaging? The repackaging ban law is to prohibit distributors from selling products after re-packaging. Packaging is primarily used to prevent a product from being destroyed or lost and to deliver a product’s information to a customer. As the excessive packaging has become a popular marketing form, however, the amount of waste has been soaring up. In order to resolve the waste issue, the Ministry of Environment carried forward the measures to prevent excessive packaging on January 14 th thi...

The largest international environmental film festival in Asia, Seoul International Eco Film Festival – hereinafter SEFF, has introduced outstanding global environmental films. Since its launch in 2004, the festival has been served as a place where people look for the ways for coexistence of the environment and human beings and discuss potential solutions and the acts required for the future. Let’s take an example of the film <Plastic China> that won the Green Competition Best Feature Film at the 15th SEFF in 2017. This film was known to trigger China’s ban on recyclable waste imports and even to affect the <Act on the Promotion of saving and recycling of resources> in Korea in 2018. This movie is about the environment polluted by our reckless consumption and dispose of single-use plastic packaging and how it is closely connected with people’s lives. It criticizes human being’s indiscreet consumption on resource in the name of convenience and how seriously the pollution ha...

As of June 22 nd , the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 was reported to be more than 8.8 million with the death toll of 466,700 in the world. This novel virus is known to be originated from a wet market in Wuhan city in China last December and started to spread globally in March of 2020. The borders are closed and schools and industries get stopped.  Experts warn that a pandemic like COVID-19 could now occur anytime and turn into an endemic, which is a disease regularly found in a certain area. Therefore, they insist that it is important to bring changes on general awareness and system based on “One Heath” approach. How is the disease related to ecosystem? And what does this approach actually mean?   What is One Health System? CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) in the US explains One Health is an approach to recognize people’s health is closely connected to that of animals and the environment we share. It emphasizes that we should understand the interc...

  Have you heard of the movie, “Dark Waters”? Inspired by a true story, the movie talks about how dangerous PFCs(Per- and polyfluoro compounds) could be. It starts with 190 milk cows dying around the town where one of the major chemical manufacturing companies, DuPont, is located. People suffer from diseases for no apparent reason. Later, it turns out that they are related to PFOA (Perfluorooctanoic Acid), a harmful kind of PFCs, secretly released from the plant. Finding out the truth, Robert Bilott, an attorney of the case, started to fight for the case for 20 years since 1998 and finally had DuPont make reparations of $671 million.   PFCs(fluoropolymer), Carcinogen That Might Be Around Us All the Time PFCs are compounds that all – or some parts- of hydrogen in hydrocarbons are substituted for fluorine. They are used widely from various industry fields such as firefighting foams and cleaning in semiconductor manufacturing plants to consumer products like cookware, food pa...