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| Chung Da-woon in her cafe/ Courtesy of Chung Da-woon |
By Kim Se-jeong
For Chung Da-woon, the Bottle Factory cafe located in Seodaemun in Seoul, is a dream in the making.
A former packaging designer for LG Electronics, Chung, 39, wants cafes free of disposable cups and is trying to fulfill her dream.
"Packaging design was fun but all were thrown away at the end. In back of my head, I had always hoped materials that were used for packaging could be reduced and well recycled," Chung said during a recent interview with The Korea Times.
The rules of her cafe are simple.
Those who stay are served in glass or pottery cups. Those who take out their drinks can do so only in tumblers provided by the cafe. The customers do not have to pay anything to take out the tumbler, but should return it. To those who come to her cafe often, she encourages them to be a cafe member so that they can have their own tumbler for take-out drinks. To date, she has a little more than 100 members. Bottle Factory does not offer plastic straws, either.
The tumblers in her cafe were donated by people from all across the country. She ran a donation call on Instagram last year "Almost 500 have been collected. Some came from Jeju Island," she said with excitement.
In the long run, she wants to make a network of cafes so that "customers who take out tumblers can return them wherever they want."
The returned tumblers would be managed by a phone application and washed and sanitized altogether. "Many details should be worked out but I am working on the solutions. From next year, I am hoping to start to create the application," Chung said.
Last year, she tried out her idea of a cafe network for one week. Her cafe and other like-minded cafe owners in the neighborhood allowed customers to return the tumblers in whatever cafe they wanted. This year again, she is organizing the experiment ― it will be for two weeks with the participation of six cafes, three bakeries and one rice cake shop.
What she is trying is drawing a big support when reducing waste, particularly plastic, is high on people's mind. From last year, the government placed a ban on serving drinks in disposable cups in cafes.
Her interest in disposable cups started when she was with the LG Electronics.
"I drank a lot of coffee and many did in my office. One day, I had my coffee cup ready to be discarded, but couldn't do it because the trash bin was full. Looking at that bin, I had sort of reckoning: I am using so many coffee cups. How many cups would be collected from an entire building or the entire city? What happens to them?"
Her reckoning led her to follow a trash truck driver, only to discover none was recycled. She tried to do something but said nothing seemed to work. "I had good ideas but they were different from actions. I realized LG was too big to do what I wanted to do."
Her career as a packaging designer came to an end after six years, and Chung stood alone with her new ideas.
About the cafe, she is positive that people will learn to enjoy the world without disposable cups.
"I think it's important for people to experience it. Only then, will they see that it's possible, and things can change."
