SSG.com, Emart, and Gmarket Sign Business Agreement to Promote PET Bottle Recycling 'Wonderful Campaign'

Participants are taking a commemorative photo for the promotion of the PET bottle recycling 'Wonderful Campaign' business agreement (from left: Hong Yoon-hee, Secretary General of WWF Korea, Yeom Seong-sik, ESG Manager of SSG.com, Kang Tae-seon, Chairman of BYN Black Yak Co., Seo Min-seok, Head of Communications at Gmarket Global, Choi Soo-jung, CEO of Coca-Cola Korea, Lee Yoo-jung, General Manager of TerraCycle Korea, Hyeong Tae-jun, Director of Sustainable Innovation Center at E-Mart)

[Asia Economy Reporter Jeon Jinyoung] SSG.com is launching a customer participation plastic recycling campaign together with Emart and Gmarket Global. This is part of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) management efforts to help increase resource recycling rates by educating proper waste separation methods.

On the 20th, SSG.com announced on the 21st that it signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for joint promotion of the ‘ONETHEPL Campaign Season 3’ with six companies including Emart, Gmarket Global, Coca-Cola Korea, TerraCycle, World Wide Fund for Nature Korea (WWF-Korea), and Black Yak. This campaign is a resource circulation activity that collects PET bottles from participating customers for recycling.

The signing ceremony held at Coca-Cola Korea headquarters in Jongno-gu, Seoul, was attended by key representatives from each company, including Choi Sujeong, CEO of Coca-Cola Korea, and Hyeong Taejun, head of Emart’s Sustainable Innovation Center, as well as officials from SSG.com and Gmarket Global.

SSG.com, Emart, and Gmarket Global joined forces to provide customers with opportunities to participate in resource circulation activities in their daily lives. The main goal is to inform that even if PET bottles are separated correctly, if mixed with improperly disposed PET bottles, all must be incinerated or landfilled. In fact, about 4.9 billion PET bottles, weighing 300,000 tons, are discarded annually in South Korea, but only 10% of these are recycled into high-quality raw materials.

On July 12, the three companies will open the ‘ONETHEPL Campaign’ page on SSG.com, Gmarket, and Auction sites, as well as on the Emart application and social networking services (SNS), to disclose detailed campaign information and rewards and accept participation applications. Starting in July, some Emart stores will operate an on-site collection program separately, along with linked promotions, pop-up exhibitions, and experiential events.

Yeom Seongsik, SSG.com’s ESG officer, said, “Last year, we led ESG management with customers by producing Coca-Cola RB bags made from recycled PET bottles and conducting a ‘Green Campaign’ that collects delivery vinyl and recycles it using label removers. We hope this campaign will also contribute to promoting proper waste separation methods for resource recycling.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.