RETURN TO PAPER(En)

‘Wish not for more or less, may it always be like Chuseok.’ Chuseok, Korean Thanksgiving Day, is the biggest holiday in Korea where you share and appreciate the year’s harvests with your family, friends and colleagues on the day of the biggest and brightest full moon of the year. It may have different names and dates for countries around the world, there will be a holiday where you celebrate with your loved ones. During this holiday, people in Korea, it is a custom to exchange gifts with family, friends and colleagues as a way to express gratitude to one another. However, the amount of packaging that comes with the gift is quite large and made of various materials that waste disposal is a huge burden on society. The look of gift sets changed over time The economic prosperity of the 1980s affected the consumer market, hence the beginning of the Chuseok gifts sets market, which was composed of various canned foods, toiletry products, and cooking oil sets. Since the mid-1980s as the econ...

The CEO of rePAPER Cheol Yoon had a memorable agenda last September 3, Saturday. It was an extracurricular activity lecture session with Junghwa High School, Seoul, advanced science team students. The students won the battle of the temptation of sweet sleep-in on the Saturday morning to arrive on time and the vice-principal among other science teachers gave them a warm welcome. The Advanced Science Team at Junghwa High School Junghwa High School’s advanced science team involves first and second year students who are in science clubs and want to major in science and engineering. The students are having opportunities to comprehend both scientific principles and theoretical backgrounds and to explore their future careers through ‘science academy’, where they can experience various exploratory experiments and ‘special lectures from science experts’, where they can observe the cases of where scientific technology is actually applied. Especially ‘special lectures from science experts,’ wh...

Since last March, we have covered the many aspects of plastic in over 6 articles. The articles include information on how plastic was born, its golden ages as the lead role of industrialization, how it ended up being a fatal threat to mankind and the environment, and its problems and solutions.  We would like to conclude this series by discussing our present and our future in this age of ‘ban plastic” Too much responsibility on the consumers  You probably went through your trash yesterday too, like every other day, dividing the plastic milk cartons and plastic strawberry containers, and all the plastic disposable takeout containers, cleaning them and separating them from cookie wrappers. But here we face several questions. Why is the recycling rate for plastic still only 20% when we work so hard to recycle plastic? (Which will drop even more when the rate of separating and putting recyclable materials is considered, which is 45%, and even lower when energy conversion rates i...

Ocean, covering 70% of the Earth surface, controls the world ’ s climate, and is a habitat for hundreds of species, a major source of proteins for 3.3 billion humans as well as a place many of them depending on for their living. However, reckless development and the increase of consumption, wastewater from urban and plants, soil contamination from chemical uses, dumping waste from vessels and planes, and oil spills from ship collisions have made our ocean sick. This not only brings a great threat to the diversity of marine creatures and ecosystem, but also harms human health, and affects community economies including fisheries and tourism. Plastic waste especially has been blamed for the worst cause of marine pollution. Then, how does this waste enter the ocean, and how does it affect the ecosystem? Let ’ s take a close look at the seriousness and think about what we should do to solve the problem!   Plastic packaging flowing into the ocean and abandoned fishing gear How does plast...

Plastic has been praised to be a ‘miracle material’ over the last 150 years. Thanks to its amazing transformation skills and functions, it has been applied to various industry fields. Yet, hundreds and thousands of reports and data insist that microplastic causes severe marine pollution and destroys the ecosystem around us and humans are facing a plastic dilemma. How well and deep do we know about plastic that we see and use everywhere? To understand what we are dealing with better, rePAPER is going to investigate the lifecycle of plastic step by step in the next 8 contents and suggest how we can work for a sustainable society. Then, shall we start with the origin of plastic?   The Origin of Plastic Plastic polymers are commonly known as synthetic resins and the name ‘plastic’ is originated from a Greek word ‘plastikos’ which means “to be easily formed or molded”. A polymer is a term to call a compound that consists of monomers, small molecules, being combined repeatedly. E...