scholarly journals PV Waste Management at the Crossroads of Circular Economy and Energy Transition: The Case of South Korea

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 3565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hana Kim ◽  
Hun Park

The South Korean government’s renewable energy deployment plan aims to increase the share of electricity generated from renewables to 20% by 2030. To reach this goal, the rate of photovoltaic (PV) installation will accelerate in the coming years. This energy transition creates a new challenge: PV wastes. This study estimates the amount of PV waste generated, the material composition of PV waste, and the amount of recyclable metals in South Korea by 2080 under four different scenarios (combining shape parameters of 5.3759 [regular-loss] and 3.5 [early-loss] with PV module lifespans of 25 and 30 years) using the Weibull distribution function. The annual waste generated will fluctuate over time depending on the scenario, but between 4299 and 5764 thousand tons of PV waste will have been generated by 2080. Under the early-loss/25-year lifespan scenario, annual PV waste generation will increase to exceed 130,000 tons in 2045, then decrease through 2063 before increasing once again. The fluctuation in annual PV waste generation appears stronger under regular-loss scenarios. An appropriate system for the monitoring, collection, and storage of PV waste needs to be arranged even before the volume becomes high enough for recycling to be economically viable. International cooperation could be a way to maintain the PV waste stream at an economically feasible scale. It would also be a good idea if the PV module could be designed in a way that would enable easier recycling or reuse.

2021 ◽  
pp. 0734242X2110637
Author(s):  
Daye Lee ◽  
Junbeum Kim ◽  
Hung-Suck Park

The industrial hazardous waste (IHW) generation to meet consumption is steadily increasing, resulting in environmental, health, and social problems around the world. To address IHW at the source, it is critical to understand the generation characteristics and key drivers on industrial hazardous waste generation (IHWG). This study analysed the generation characteristics of IHW of South Korea from 2008 to 2018 by decoupling and index decomposition analysis using Log Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) model. South Korea presented unstable decoupling of IHWG from economic growth, so more effective waste management regulations are needed to support a stable decoupling. One most critical finding was that the factors of industrial output and industrial characteristic of IHWG-to-energy were major driving factors influencing the increase of IHWG, whereas those of industrial structure and energy efficiency affect to the decrease of IHWG in most industries. In addition, the result clearly confirmed that the contribution of driving factors affecting the IHWG differs by industry. These results provide significant policy insights that the South Korean government needs institutional improvement and refinement of customised IHW management according to the characteristics of IHWG.


Author(s):  
Stephan Haggard ◽  
Marcus Noland

This chapter draws on two unprecedented surveys of firms based in China and South Korea engaged in trade and investment with North Korea. It examines both the nature of cross-border exchange as well as the formal and informal institutions that underpin it and provides evidence of ongoing state control. Chinese firms in particular report that the business environment is highly corrupt; a consideration of dispute settlement and measures of trust suggest how the development of cross-border exchange is limited by the regime's overall economic strategy. South Korean firms operate in an enclave setting that imports South Korean property rights, and China my be moving to such a model over time. These findings cast doubt on the engagement model.


2019 ◽  
Vol 129 (624) ◽  
pp. 3154-3188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruixue Jia ◽  
Hyejin Ku

Abstract This paper studies the impact of air pollution spillover from China to South Korea. To isolate the effects of cross-border pollution spillover from that of locally generated pollution, we exploit within-South Korea and over-time variation in the incidence of Asian dust—a meteorological phenomenon exogenous to district–time cells in South Korea—together with temporal variations in China's air quality. We find that conditional on being exposed to Asian dust, increased pollution in China leads to increased mortality from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases in South Korean districts, with the most vulnerable being the elderly and children under five.


Author(s):  
Minjeong Kim

With the unprecedented number of foreign-born population, South Korea has tried to reinvent itself as a multicultural society, but the intense multiculturalism efforts have focused exclusively on marriage immigrants. At the advent and height of South Korea’s eschewed multiculturalism, Elusive Belonging takes the readers to everyday lives of marriage immigrants in rural Korea where the projected image of a developed Korea which lured marriage immigrants and the gloomy reality of rural lives clashed. The intimate ethnographic account pays attention to emotional entanglements among Filipina wives, South Korean husbands, in-laws, and multicultural agents, with particular focus on such emotions as love, intimacy, anxiety, gratitude, and derision, which shape marriage immigrants’ fragmented citizenship and elusive sense of belonging to their new country. This investigation of the politics of belonging illuminates how marriage immigrants explore to mold a new identity in their new home, Korea.


2002 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 737-758 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Maman

This paper examines the emergence of business groups in Israel and South Korea. The paper questions how, in very different institutional contexts, similar economic organizations emerged. In contrast to the political, cultural and market perspectives, the comparative institutional analysis adopted in this research suggests that one factor alone could not explain the emergence of business groups. In Israel and South Korea, business groups emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, and there are common factors underlying their formation: state-society relations, the roles and beliefs of the elites, and the relative absence of multinational corporations in the economy. To a large extent, the chaebol are the result of an intended creation of the South Korean state, whereas the Israeli business groups are the outcome of state policies in the economic realm. In both countries, the state elite held a developmental ideology, did not rely on market forces for economic development, and had a desire for greater economic and military self-sufficiency. In addition, both states were recipients of large grants and loans from other countries, which made them less dependent on direct foreign investments. As a result, the emerging groups were protected from the intense competition of multinational corporations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110207
Author(s):  
Youngrim Kim ◽  
Yuchen Chen ◽  
Fan Liang

This article critically examines South Korea and China’s COVID-19 tracking apps by bridging surveillance studies with feminist technoscience’s understanding of the “politics of care”. Conducting critical readings of the apps and textual analysis of discursive materials, we demonstrate how the ideological, relational, and material practices of the apps strategically deployed “care” to normalize a particular form of pandemic technogovernance in these two countries. In the ideological dimension, media and state discourse utilized a combination of vilifying and nationalist rhetoric that framed one’s acquiescence to surveillance as a demonstration of national belonging. Meanwhile, the apps also performed ambivalent roles in facilitating essential care services and mobilizing self-tracking activities, which contributed to the manufacturing of pseudonormality in these societies. In the end, we argue that the Chinese and South Korean governments managed to frame their aggressive surveillance infrastructure during COVID-19 as a form of paternalistic care by finessing the blurred boundaries between care and control.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sung-Hee Oh ◽  
Hyemin Ku ◽  
Kang Seo Park

Abstract Background Diabetes leads to severe complications and imposes health and financial burdens on the society. However, currently existing domestic public health studies of diabetes in South Korea mainly focus on prevalence, and data on the nationwide burden of diabetes in South Korea are lacking. The study aimed to estimate the prevalence and economic burden of diabetes imposed on the South Korean society. Methods A prevalence-based cost-of-illness study was conducted using the Korean national claims database. Adult diabetic patients were defined as those aged ≥20 years with claim records containing diagnostic codes for diabetes (E10-E14) during at least two outpatient visits or one hospitalization. Direct costs included medical costs for the diagnosis and treatment of diabetes and transportation costs. Indirect costs included productivity loss costs due to morbidity and premature death and caregivers’ costs. Subgroup analyses were conducted according to the type of diabetes, age (< 65 vs. ≥65), diabetes medication, experience of hospitalization, and presence of diabetic complications or related comorbidities. Results A total of 4,472,133 patients were diagnosed with diabetes in Korea in 2017. The average annual prevalence of diabetes was estimated at 10.7%. The diabetes-related economic burden was USD 18,293 million, with an average per capita cost of USD 4090 in 2019. Medical costs accounted for the biggest portion of the total cost (69.5%), followed by productivity loss costs (17.9%), caregivers’ costs (10.2%), and transportation costs (2.4%). According to subgroup analyses, type 2 diabetes, presence of diabetic complications or related comorbidities, diabetes medication, and hospitalization represented the biggest portion of the economic burden for diabetes. As the number of complications increased from one to three or more, the per capita cost increased from USD 3991 to USD 11,965. In inpatient settings, the per capita cost was ~ 10.8 times higher than that of outpatient settings. Conclusions South Korea has a slightly high prevalence and economic burden of diabetes. These findings highlight the need for effective strategies to manage diabetic patients and suggest that policy makers allocate more health care resources to diabetes. This is the first study on this topic, conducted using a nationally representative claims database in South Korea.


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