Kolon Recycles Used Masks into Clothes Hangers... "Idea by Lee Woong-yeol"

Collected 300kg to make 29,000 hangers
Equivalent to planting about 1,844 pine trees

Kolon Group employees are introducing recycled hangers made from used masks in front of a mask collection box. Photo by Kolon Group

[Asia Economy Reporter Choi Seoyoon] Kolon Group has succeeded for the first time in Korea in collecting disposable masks in large quantities and recycling them into clothes hangers.

According to Kolon Group on the 17th, the disposable mask collection and recycling campaign began when Honorary Chairman Lee Woong-yeol participated in the eco-friendly relay campaign "GoGo Challenge" last October and proposed the idea. Approximately 60 million disposable masks are discarded every month in Korea alone, and since they take more than 450 years to decompose naturally, they have been adversely affecting the ecosystem.

Kolon Group installed disposable mask collection boxes at seven major business sites nationwide and provided portable collection bags to employees to encourage and facilitate easy participation in the campaign. The collected waste masks were reborn as store clothes hangers needed by Kolon Industries FnC division. Due to the nature of the fashion business, the FnC division uses recycled clothes hangers essential for displays, which not only reduces costs but also decreases plastic usage, thereby contributing to environmental preservation.

There have been various attempts to recycle polypropylene, the chemical material used in disposable masks, but difficulties arose due to the hassle of separately separating mask filters, nose wires, strings, and other components. Kolon Group overcame this by mixing other materials with the initially collected waste masks to produce about 2 tons of polypropylene pellets, which were then made into a total of approximately 29,000 clothes hangers.

Producing 1 ton of polypropylene, commonly used for masks and hangers, requires 1.5 tons of raw material, and simply incinerating masks emits 1.2 tons of carbon. Therefore, this effort is expected to reduce carbon emissions by about 5.4 tons. This is equivalent to planting 1,844 15-year-old pine trees.

Kolon Group plans to continue the disposable mask collection activities. The first batch was recycled into clothes hangers, but since polypropylene is used in a wide variety of fields, they plan to expand its applications to various products in the future.

Kim Seung-il, Vice President of Kolon Group CSR Office, said, "This waste mask recycling started from the idea that disposable masks used to protect health should not become a cause of environmental pollution." He added, "We will implement ideas to recycle disposable waste masks into various fields that can reduce plastic usage."