South Korea's Plastic Problem

In the article "South Korea's plastic problem is a literal trash fire," written by Jake Kwon for CNN details the environmental issue of a village in South Korea having a huge trash problem. The village is called Uiseong, and is home to Olympic silver medalists in curling the "Garlic Girls". Recently, a huge mountain of garbage has been piling up in the small village causing many issues. The pile is approximately 170,000 tons, and has started to catch on fire causing huge amounts of smoke. Also, the plastic burnt in the pile is resulting in a dangerous stench of chemicals into the air. The fires have been occurring for three months, and its nearly impossible to extinguish. Once the firefighter get one flame out, another one erupts. The smoke from the fire is also causing issues for farmer in the area. Indeed, the smoke blocks out the sun resulting in the crops not being able to grow, or coming in gnarled. Another thing is the smoke is hurting the residents eyes and heads from the burning sensation. The pile of waste has been accumulating since 2008, but the trash pile got out of hand starting in 2016, with the owner putting 80x more waste than allowed in the area. This is all in correlation to the 1.2 million tons of illegally abandoned waste in South Korea. Hopefully, the fires will soon be completely extinguished, and a new dumping site is found.

Link: https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/02/asia/south-korea-trash-ships-intl/index.html

Alyssa Dahnke