The Korea Herald, in collaboration with the Korea Environmental Industry & Technology Institute, is presenting a series of articles introducing small but promising environmental tech firms. This is the eighth installment. ― Ed.


Waste handling is a chronic headache for cities around the world. While growing public environmental awareness has led to difficulty in clearing new land for landfills, there is no drastic reduction in the amount of waste that people throw away.

Park Nae-joon, CEO of Shen-Tech, takes pride in that his company helps the world tackle the problem by fulfilling one of the most important steps in the waste handling process ― sorting recyclable materials and turning residual waste into energy.

The Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province-based firm provides complete waste treatment plants that recover recyclable materials such as metals and glass and shred the combustible fraction into fluff and morph it into solid fuel called refuse-derived fuel. RDF is used by companies such as cement makers.

It has built waste sorting facilities for municipalities such as Ansan, Cheonan and Chuncheon, sweeping almost all major deals in the field.

Korea’s waste collection and disposal system is one of the most advanced, with strong regulations, which Park said has helped his and other firms in the waste industry to be competitive globally.

Trash sorting has become part of everyday routine for Koreans at home, ever since the country implemented in 1995 a pay-as-you-throw system. 

“Korea may be buying some high-tech products from overseas, but in the field of municipal waste treatment, we’re an advanced country,” he said.

The well-established system, however, leaves little room for market growth.

Shen-Tech is now aggressively targeting Russia and Southeast Asian countries for new business opportunities.

The company, which first started as a trading firm in 1992 selling German-made waste compressors, has been selling its own brand of compressors in Japan for over a decade.

In 2010, it started building waste sorting and waste-to-energy plants overseas, starting with a facility in Vladivostok, Russia, with a daily capacity of 800 tons. 

This year, it landed a new deal in the Chechen Republic which calls for the company to construct waste handling facilities in nine regions.

“We now generate almost half of our profit from overseas and I expect the ratio to rise to 70 percent next year,” Park said.

Target markets are Russia and other former Soviet Union republics and Southeast Asian countries, he said.

“Countries have their own way of handling urban waste. So we need to develop products that suit their systems,” the CEO said.

In the case of Russia, for example, recyclables and non-recyclables are all mixed, because almost no sorting is conducted at home and other sources of trash.

“So we designed a facility that first sorts recyclables and then turns residual waste into energy,” he said.

“The more these countries become environmentally conscious, the bigger the chances for us in waste sorting for recycling and waste-to-energy technologies,” he added.

By Lee Sun-young (milaya@heraldcorp.com)