Pollution and Recycling—A Linguistics Approach
My mom’s been in town from California to help out with Xander this month, and we’ve been talking about recycling various products. From what I know and have seen and from what my mom’s told me, in Korea, the recycling program is amazing. There are easily accessible programs to recycle everything that is recyclable. This is in contrast to the U.S., where the availability of recycling programs is limited and varies widely by localities. For example, we in the U.S. are in fact unable to recycle lots of products with recyclable indications—the three arrows arranged in a triangle with a number inside—in our cities.
I have not looked into a systematic studies of why recycling institutions vary across countries, but I came up with an interesting hypothesis. The word for pollution in Korean is 공해—gong-hae. Written out in Chinese characters, it is 公害 and it literally means “public bad.” Perhaps the concept of pollution in Korean has a more visceral consequence than the concept in English. Of course, one piece of evidence against this hypothesis is China, where presumably the word for pollution is the same in Korea but environmental protection has been lagging.
