On Saturday, December 28th at 8:55 PM, EBS1TV will feature new uses of ‘Extreme Job’ resources! An episode on the transformation of old clothes and Styrofoam will be broadcast.
Building a house with old clothes and discarded banners?
Today, we live in an ‘age of excess’ where we can easily purchase new clothes and easily throw them away. The amount of clothing waste discarded in Korea alone has rapidly increased to approximately 110,000 tons per year, and when you add the fabric scraps produced by various fashion companies and the banners that come out every election season, the number increases exponentially. However, it is said that this waste fiber can be used to make not only interior and exterior building materials but also various types of furniture. However, the path from recycling to upcycling is never easy. This is because, from the first step of the process, used clothes, which serve as raw materials, must be manually sorted one by one. Excluding coated fibers, only clothes made of synthetic fibers and natural fibers are selected and first classified, and then through a multi-step shredding process, they are cut into pieces as fine as cotton, which are then made as thin as paper and stacked in hundreds of layers for compression. You have to go through the process. Fiber panels are manufactured using only physical methods without the use of chemical adhesives! We take a look into the struggles of those who walk with pride on the difficult and thorny path that others do not take.
Transformation of difficult-to-treat Styrofoam
For those living in modern society, Styrofoam is sometimes called a necessary evil. After COVID-19, as delivery transactions increased, Styrofoam emissions also surged to about 75,000 tons per year. However, there are people who generously recycle Styrofoam, which neither rots nor burns, and breathes new life into it. A Styrofoam processing company in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi-do! After the weekend, on Monday, untimely congestion occurs on the road in front of the factory with more than 70 garbage trucks a day. A factory that operates non-stop all day from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., amid huge piles of Styrofoam! When raw materials are received, 8 to 9 workers are deployed at the same time to manually remove various stickers and tapes. Workers sweat hard every day, fighting against cold in winter and bad smells in summer! At the primary factory here, Styrofoam is selected and melted, and its volume is compressed to 1/100 to produce ingots, the primary recycled raw material. It then moves to the second and third plants, where the removal of foreign substances, melting, and compression processes are repeated several times. Only after burning one’s body so hotly and fighting against impurities does it become a construction material that can be reborn as bathroom furniture. We follow the life-turning story of Styrofoam, which was reborn from a difficult-to-treat trash to an everyday necessity.
Economy Queen Reporter Park Yu-mi Photo EBS Extreme Job
.