Covid partitions now a huge plastic waste problem for Korean schools

Teaching staff at Samil Technical High School in Suwon, Gyeonggi, on Feb. 27 remove partitions installed at cafeterias as a safety measure to prevent Covid-19, ahead of the new academic semester. [YONHAP]

Plastic partitions installed at school cafeterias and classrooms to prevent the spread of Covid-19 have now become a huge heap of garbage schools are struggling to properly dispose of.

Ahead of the new semester, the Education Ministry announced it would lift the mandatory partitions installed in cafeterias and classrooms. Students will also no longer be required to get their temperatures checked upon arrival or to wear masks in classrooms, though they will be strongly recommended to wear them in certain situations such as during choir class.

The easing of these regulations stirred up confusion as the ministry let schools decide for themselves whether or not to maintain the rules, including the plastic dividers. The schools will also have to decide to either store them or dispose of them.

A total of 99.4 percent of schools in the country with cafeterias have installed plastic partitions, based on data from September 2021, according to the Education Ministry. Some 4.7 million physical dividers that were used in school cafeterias are expected to be thrown away. When adding to that the number of the partitions used in classrooms, the total may rise to over 10 million.

According to experts, the total area of plastic dividers to be thrown away in the country will be more than twice the size of Yeouido in western Seoul. Yeouido is about 2.9 square kilometers (1.1 square miles).

But the ministry explained the exact amount of waste that these dividers will create will be difficult to calculate, as the size and shape of these dividers are all different.

School staff say they are at a loss of what to do with these dividers.

“We removed all of the partitions installed at cafeterias on the weekend right before the semester started,” said a teacher from a high school in Gangwon.

“The education office recommend that we remove them but did not tell us how to throw them away, so it took us a very long to find a company that could dispose of them for us.”

An official from the Education Ministry told the JoongAng Ilbo that schools can “keep these partitions after removing them and use them again in case a pandemic hits again.”

But those who work at the schools say it may not be a good idea to keep them, for hygienic reasons, and say there is not enough space to store them.

One elementary school in Seoul decided to keep the partitions in cafeterias but remove them in classrooms after conducting a survey on the students' parents.

“These physical dividers that were installed in classrooms are stored in a warehouse on the rooftop,” said a school staff member.

“If we let schools decide what to do with these plastic materials, the cost of taking care of the them may be an issue, and it is also concerning that it may impact the environment negatively if dealt with inappropriately.”

But recycling these partitions may be difficult.

Most partitions used in cafeterias are made of various plastic materials including polycarbonate and acrylic.

According to recycling companies, these partitions can be recycled as long as they are sorted by material and no other objects such as tape or stickers are attached to them.

“There are even cases where these plastic dividers are attached to the table with adhesives so strong that we would need to take pieces of the tabletop off of these dividers,” said a spokesperson for a recycling company.

“Recycling these dividers is a job that requires technique.”

One high school in Suwon, Gyeonggi, disposed of the transparent partitions as general waste, not recycling, after removing them from desks in classrooms on March 1.

“We were unable to afford acrylic dividers since they cost 10 million won [$7,700],” said a staffer from the high school.

“Instead, we spent 1 million won to create dividers, but the material was non-recyclable to begin with.”

Some say the plastic waste should be collected and handled by the ministry.

“Related authorities, including the Education Ministry, should collect and manage them,” said Hong Su-yeol, director of the Resource Recycle Consulting.

“Recycling centers should be established in different areas so that these partitions can be classified by materials and systemically recycled after removing other material stuck onto these dividers.”

These dividers are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how much waste the pandemic has created. According to the Environment Ministry, the amount of plastic waste rose 17.7 percent in 2021 compared to 2019.

When delivery and take-out services become the go-to option during the pandemic era, approximately 740,000 tons of additional plastic waste were created per year. Online transactions of food delivery rose from 9.7 trillion won in 2019 to 17.3 trillion won in 2020 and to 25.7 trillion won in 2021, according to Statistics Korea.

The amount of trash from masks, in particular, is expected to have increased astronomically.

People in Korea used one mask for an average of 2.3 days, which calculates to about 20 million used per day and around 7.3 billion per year in the country, according to data released by the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights Commission.

Single-use masks are mostly made of polypropylene (PP), which takes over 400 years to decompose.

The Environment Ministry has set a goal to reduce plastic waste by 20 percent by 2025, but does not have specific measures set in place on how to deal with post-Covid-19 waste including dividers.

Earlier, the ministry had recycled 30,000 dividers of the 500,000 used for the 2021 College Scholastic Abilities Test (CSAT) after distributing the remainder to public offices. However, regarding the recent disposal of dividers, the ministry said “there was no such request from the Education Ministry.”

BY CHANG YOON-SEO, JEONG EUN-HYE, CHO JUNG-WOO [cho.jungwoo1@joongang.co.kr]