Gwangju Incineration Plant Site Selection Fails Again... Samgeo-dong Candidate Status Revoked

False Resident Registrations Revealed in Referendum, Consent Rate Falls Below Standard

Gwangju City Cancels Third Site Selection Attempt... 2030 Operation Start in Jeopardy

The plan to build a resource recovery facility (waste incineration plant) in Gwangju City has returned to square one. Following a prosecution investigation that revealed cases of false resident registration during the local referendum, the site qualification for the final candidate location in Samgeo-dong, Gwangsan District, has been revoked.

On May 20, Gwangju City convened the Resource Recovery Facility Site Selection Committee and decided to cancel the candidate status of the Samgeo-dong site in Gwangsan District (83,700 square meters), which had been finalized as the incineration plant candidate in December 2024.

The Site Selection Committee ultimately revoked the qualification of Samgeo-dong as the optimal candidate site after deliberation and resolution, based on the recent prosecution findings of violations of the Resident Registration Act such as false resident registrations, which rendered the site no longer eligible under the original application requirements.

The area around Samgeo-dong in Gwangsan-gu, which was selected as the optimal candidate site by the Gwangju Metropolitan Resource Recovery Facility Site Selection Committee. Provided by Gwangju City

A core requirement for the third round of applications was that “more than 50% of household heads registered as residents actually living within 300 meters of the site boundary must agree to the project.”

However, after the prosecution investigation recently confirmed illegally registered resident information, the actual consent rate among residents, excluding the fraudulent registrations, dropped from the previous 54.5% to 47.3%. As a result, the site no longer met the minimum application threshold of 50%.

The Gwangju District Prosecutors’ Office recently indicted eight people, including the chairman of Gwangju Municipal No.1 Psychiatric Hospital, on charges of violating the Resident Registration Act, and placed four others on deferred prosecution. They are accused of falsely transferring their addresses to hospital dormitories and other locations in order to secure the required level of resident consent during last year’s site selection process for the incineration plant.

Since 2022, Gwangju City has attempted to solicit applications for a new incineration plant site, but the process failed twice due to resident opposition. Now, with the third attempt scrapped as a result of the prosecution investigation, the project has again hit a major obstacle. Accordingly, there are now widespread expectations that the original target of starting operations in 2030 will be virtually impossible to achieve.

Jung Mikyung, head of Gwangju City’s Resource Circulation Division, stated, “Since a core requirement for the application was compromised, we have decided, in accordance with the Site Selection Committee’s resolution, to revoke the site’s status as the optimal candidate. We plan to quickly complete the administrative procedures following this cancellation and closely discuss subsequent measures going forward.”

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