Jeju Development Corporation Wins Presidential Award at Active Administration Best Practices Competition

[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Hye-seon] Jeju Special Self-Governing Province Development Corporation announced on the 28th that it won the Grand Prize (Presidential Award) in the Local Public Corporations and Corporations category at the ‘2021 Second Half Government-wide Innovation Excellent Proactive Administration Best Practices Competition’ jointly conducted by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, the Ministry of Personnel Management, and the Office for Government Policy Coordination.

The ‘Proactive Administration Best Practices Competition’ is designed to discover and spread excellent cases that citizens can feel, targeting central administrative agencies, local governments, public institutions, and local public corporations and corporations. The winners are decided through evaluations by a jury of about 1,000 citizens and private experts.

Jeju Development Corporation received the grand prize for the campaign ‘Small Plastics Reborn: Bottle Caps Re-born.’ This campaign is a project that expands resource circulation by upcycling small plastics, such as bottle caps?which are blind spots in management unlike PET bottles with established circular economy systems?into fashion items or accessories amid the surge of plastic waste due to COVID-19.

To this end, the corporation collected discarded bottle caps within Jeju Island together with local residents and held the ‘Samdasoo Eco Goods Event’ through the Jeju Samdasoo social media account, gathering bottle caps to create the ‘Samdasoo ECO Bookshelf.’

Hundreds of thousands of people participated in this event, collecting 4 million bottle caps. If lined up, their length would equal 544 times the height of the 63 Building. The collected bottle caps were upcycled into products with new value, such as hats (using 12 bottle caps) and bookshelves (using 100 bottle caps).

Kim Jeong-hak, President of Jeju Development Corporation, said, "The campaign, which started from concerns that small plastics, often overlooked, might have a greater impact on the environment and ecosystem, has led to good results. We hope that the selection as an excellent case of proactive administration will lead to the development of various measures for small plastic recycling, and the corporation will continue to discover diverse effective eco-friendly projects."