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Brian Lehrer:

Brian Lehrer on WNYC. And now that New York has a plastic bag ban, what comes next? Back in January, you might remember a conversation we had with Danielle Muoio, city hall reporter for Politico, about a series they did on the city's unsuccessful efforts to get more people to participate in various composting and recycling programs. So now we continue that conversation, taking a look at another city that's been far more successful, Seoul, South Korea. 95% of Seoul's food waste is recycled, and that is a stark contrast to New York City, which has diverted only a small fraction of organic waste from landfills. So what are they doing that New York isn't? Here to help answer that question is Rivka Galchen, novelist, journalist, and frequent contributor to the New Yorker. She recently traveled to South Korea to do some, forgive me, soul searching on the topic, and she is back in the city and in our studio. Rivka, thanks so much for joining.

Rivka Galchen:

Thank you for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer:

Just remind us of what the problem is here. Why should New Yorkers be thinking about what happens to their food and other organic waste?

Rivka Galchen:

Exactly. It sounds like a nice thing to do to recycle your food waste, but it's actually an incredibly important thing to do, one would argue much more important than any other form of recycling we do. And the reason for that is because food waste that goes to a landfill starved of oxygen basically becomes a poison for the climate. It releases methane, which is much more powerful than CO2 and is a really significant contributor to global warming, whereas if it's composted or turned into energy, there's actually a few different things you can do with it besides composting. It becomes a carbon-capturing process. It provides energy. It just becomes a net positive.

Brian Lehrer:

So let's talk about your trip to South Korea. You're right that it took a lot of effort by advocacy and activist groups to get people to buy into composting. What did those efforts look like?

Rivka Galchen:

Exactly. It was interesting to learn about it because here in New York, sort of the center for progressive city, you think of composting as something that the people are asking for and that the government isn't delivering. But there in South Korea, you get the perspective it was something that, on the one hand, people were asking for the landfills not to be making people who picked over the trash in the landfills sick, but at the same time, no one wanted any food waste recycling facilities in their neighborhood. They basically did a few things. They made it mandatory eventually. They charged for regular garbage but made, at first, recycling free. They helped the industries that could handle food waste recycling with low-interest loans or other ways to build up the industries that could handle it.

Brian Lehrer:

And while those activist citizens were making the case to their fellow members of the public, what did the government's efforts look like over there?

Rivka Galchen:

Yeah, exactly. So I overlapped it a little bit, but the advocacy groups worked between the government and the population. So, on the one hand, those advocacy citizen groups were the ones who brought to the attention of the government the problem of the landfills making basically poor people in poor neighborhoods sick. And at the same time, they did the other direction. When the government started trying to do these recycling efforts and there was so much resistance in the population both because it's annoying and difficult but also just fears about what it would be like and if it would produce a terrible stink in their neighborhood, they did the door-to-door knocking, so it was on both sides. The government did the policy, they supported the industry, and the advocacy groups did the communication.

Brian Lehrer:

There've been citywide efforts here in the past to encourage composting. What's on the books already, and why haven't they worked better?

Rivka Galchen:

Exactly. So there have been efforts, and it's actually available to three and a half million New Yorkers. So it's available to a large number of New Yorkers. Now, how many people actually know about that? People have busy lives, a million priorities. This isn't probably too high on their priority list, so it's basically a lack of participation. That's the main problem.

Brian Lehrer:

And I think that's really an important part of this conversation and an important part of your article. It's not that it isn't available in New York, it's that it's voluntary, so there isn't a system in place. So you bring out your garbage on the right days, and the sanitation department picks it up, that there's something that's that easy. With composting, you have to go out of your way.

Rivka Galchen:

Exactly. Most New Yorkers have to really go out of their way to do composting, to ask for the bin, and also just don't know about it. Even people who are very interested in climate activism usually are not even aware of the fact that recycling of organics is a great way to make an impact on climate change. It's just not cool. It's not fun to think about garbage, so that's been holding it back.

Brian Lehrer:

Why did the South Korean government decide to put so much into their efforts, and why does that same political will seem to be missing here in New York City or even nationwide?

Rivka Galchen:

Yeah, I think there's a few factors there that I learned about. One is South Korea didn't slowly have an urban population. They basically went from people mostly living in rural areas to the people being primarily in urban areas very, very rapidly. So when we think about the Olympic Games in Seoul or the World Cup in Seoul, that was like a fulcrum for them going from one kind of culture into this sort of now they're famous for, plastic surgery and cell phones, like a hyper-modern culture. So they had to deal with it so rapidly, and they were, therefore, I think just more accustomed or ready to handling things with major top-down policy changes.

Brian Lehrer:

Some of our listeners, especially if they have friends or relatives or if they've ever lived on the West Coast, know that they're a little ahead of us there. San Francisco, Seattle. And yet you argue that Seoul is a better exemplar for New York than those West Coast cities that are still ahead of us. How come?

Rivka Galchen:

Well, the main reason is that the kind of first, "Oh, well, New York is so much harder," argument is that our housing stock is so different, is that if you're dealing with individual houses, it's easy to get people to start by separating their yard waste. They're used to that. And also you can ticket and fine people for not complying if you do make a mandatory program, whereas how do you ticket and fine a building that has 300 residents and everyone's putting it into the same bin? So there is an easier compliance model in those cities, but at the end of the day, Seoul is a city that has a housing stock that much more closely resembles New York's.

Brian Lehrer:

And, to that point, the bulk of what you write about is the urban side of this comparing Seoul and New York City. Did these efforts also reach out into the suburbs? Because I hear they eat food, too.

Rivka Galchen:

You mean the suburbs in New York or the suburbs in Seoul?

Brian Lehrer:

Well, in Seoul.

Rivka Galchen:

Yeah.

Brian Lehrer:

I'm just making a joke, obviously.

Rivka Galchen:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, of course.

Brian Lehrer:

But, yes, was there a suburban effort, and was it different than the urban effort with the buildings?

Rivka Galchen:

Absolutely. It's actually a national program. So, I looked at Seoul because it's the city that most closely resembles New York, but in the entire country, there's a 95% food waste recycling. And what they did is they did a very smart thing, which is they adapted to the situation and they let the different localities handle it their own way. So in some localities, they have these really fancy machines that weigh how much waste you put in there and charge you per your amount of waste. And then in other places, you just buy a bag. It costs some fixed amount. You put it out on your front lawn with your other garbage. So they let every location come up with a strategy that made sense for them.

Brian Lehrer:

And one of the most interesting parts of your article, before we run out of time, was that ideas about food waste in South Korea changed as the culture around food and dining themselves changed. How so?

Rivka Galchen:

Yeah. Well there was, again, referencing the rapid changes that South Korea went through, because they had suffered so much years of starvation and a lot of difficulties, there was a culture of abundance when it came to eating. In fact, it seemed wrong to have a table that didn't have many, many, many plates and lots of leftovers. And that was just what good living meant. And that's something that is slowly beginning to change. And some of the restaurant people I spoke to there said it's even as simple as understanding that this is a food meant to be eaten rather than a food for show. And there's a bit of a shift in the younger generation.

Brian Lehrer:

And so have you identified anything about New Yorkers' food culture that might be an inhibitor for getting people to buy into composting?

Rivka Galchen:

Yeah. I think New Yorkers' food culture or other culture, the main barrier to composting is just that weird, grudging aversion to change. So even I feel like the plastic bag ban, which I've talked to so many people who I know basically support the idea, it's still fun to grouse about it and complain.

Brian Lehrer:

Rivka Galchen, novelist, journalist, and frequent contributor to the New Yorker, where she has now written about her trip to South Korea to offer a model to New Yorkers for how we might do much better than we do at composting. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Rivka Galchen:

Thank you, Brian.

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