/ Seoul, South Korea / Chungpa-dong & Yeonhui-dong / Since 2024 37.57°N, 126.98°E

Rehabilitate
circular
economy

Volunteers walking down a narrow sunlit alley with collection bags.

Two blue crates filled with rinsed, flattened paper cartons, photographed from above.

A café worker putting a milk carton into a green collection bag marked for paper cartons.

We give Seoul’s everyday waste a second life, and bring it back to the households that need it.

Our story

Beneath began in Seoul in 2024.

Discarded materials do not disappear. The cost of handling them falls on the communities least responsible for producing them. That is what we mean by climate inequality.

So we start at the point of disposal rather than the point of production. We collect paper cartons and coffee grounds from cafés across Seoul, work with recycling partners to have them reprocessed, and turn them into things people can use.

What a neighbourhood throws away comes back to that neighbourhood.

A street in Chungpa-dong on the collection route: volunteers walking with bags past the shopfronts.

What we do

Wasted materials, valuable resources

Addressing climate inequality by reimagining discarded materials as valuable resources, bridging environmental sustainability and social equity through collaboration.

The pipeline is collect, reclaim, innovate, distribute. Each step is recorded. The aim is a resource cycle that keeps working without us.

A district
revived, from
the counter up

Two weekly collection routes across Chungpa-dong and Yeonhui-dong, run with 17 partner organisations. Every pickup is counted at the site it came from, so these are the route’s own records rather than estimates.

7,341