Seoul Government Faces Protests to Trash Incinerator Construction While Jeju Residents Competed to Have One
Jeju island had multiple communities that wanted to host their trash incinerator while Seoul cannot find one place to put it without protests:
While Seoul’s plan to build a new trash incinerator in the western district of Mapo has been sparking protests from residents since last year, a similar plan on Jeju Island has developed into a very different course of action: Islanders are welcoming with open arms the construction of landfill facilities and several districts competed with each other to have them right in their backyards.
Korea Times
Last September, Jeju Special Self-Governing Province selected an uninhabited patch of the authority’s land in the Sangcheon area of Andeok District in the island’s southern city of Seogwipo as a site for the island’s new waste incinerator. The selection process, which lasted nine months from December 2021, saw no disputes with the residents. It was a clean race to win the municipality’s bid with no visible signs of a “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) attitude among the locals.
After finding out what benefits the authority will provide to the residents living around the selected site, three different communities in Seogwipo voluntarily stepped up for the bid. Each community hoisted banners welcoming the new incinerator with hopeful and cheerful messages, a rare scene in Korea, where the public hardly embraces the construction of a large-scale waste incinerator that burns hundreds of tons of garbage every day.
You can read more at the link, but the Jeju community that hosted the trash incinerator received benefits such as new roads, community center, a swimming pool. Such incentives in Seoul are not enough to sway people who largely already have access to such facilities, thus the NIMBYism.
Maybe offering free trash service to the neighborhood in Seoul that hosts the incinerator and higher fees everywhere else might be a way to persuade a neighborhood to want to host the plant?
