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Other than rice, bread, and water, what do you think we intake every day?   According to the report released by New Castle University in 2019, we eat plastic that is equivalent to a credit card per week. Plastics produced in 2015 were 320 million tons and 146 million tons of them, accounting for 42%, were used for packaging which mostly ended up in the environment as microplastics. Researchers are warning that these can be a greater threat to the ecosystem than the waste that is easily spotted with our bare eyes. How are the microplastics generated and why should we be alert? We will check the definition of microplastics and their hazardousness and how we should act.   What are microplastics? Microplastics are a term for solid plastic particles with functional additives in a size of 100nm – 5 mm and the term was first used by Dr. Richard Thompson in 2004. Depending on how they are produced, microplastics are categorized into primary plastics and secondary plastics. Primary mi...

As the amendment of Act on the Promotion of Saving and Recycling of Resources was resolved     at a Cabinet council on the 2 nd of June, Ministry of Environment officially announced that a refund- deposit system on disposable cups is set to start from June of 2022. The system asks a customer to pay a deposit to use a single-use cup at a cafe and give a refund when returning the container. In fact, it is not brand-new in Korea.   The First Introduction in 2002, and Homework It Left Ministry of Environment first introduced the deposit system on disposable cups in 2002 in order to reduce the use of paper cups and to improve the collecting rate. At that time, it was upon the voluntary agreement with 5 café chains and 13 fast food restaurants. The ministry charged $0.083 and $0.041 for deposit on a fast food cup and a coffee cup respectively, and the unreturned deposit was supposed to be used for environmental scholarship and funds for environmental conservation. Accord...