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developed countries, which have developed technologies, are also facing the same

problem due to the substantial consumption of plastic with low recycling rates.

Plastic has just become too convenient and accessible to us that we use them

blindly. Every year, approximately 8 million tonnes of plastic waste ends up in the

ocean, while the rest stay on land and take up a vast amount of space. Since plastic

is non-biodegradable, the only option for us is to find a way to reduce the amount

of plastic usage in order to deal with the overwhelming amount of plastic wastes.

Along with the increase in consumption of plastics, people started to achieve a

high level of awareness toward the effect of plastics on the deteriorating

environment. However, individuals’ voluntary actions had limitations. Therefore, the

governments started to interfere by adopting policies.

Singapore is one of the countries that regulates the plastic usage at consumer

level. According to the Singapore Environment Agency (NEA), plastic accounted for

the largest portion of discharged garbage in 2018, 760,000 tons of plastic out of

7.7 million tons of discharged garbage, and only 6 percent of them were recycled.

In addition, people in Singapore used 2.2 million plastic straws just in a day on

average. Recognizing the seriousness of plastic, Singaporean government recently

decided to regulate the production of plastic straws at 270 restaurants across

Singapore, starting from July 1st of 2019. At an industrial level, our research team

could assume that the government of Singapore regulated the production of plastic

products by forcing some restaurants to discontinue the use of plastic straws. As

such, plastic straws have become less accessible to consumers, forcing the

restaurants to come up with alternatives such as paper or metal straws, which are

less harmful to the environment than plastics.

Along with Singapore, South Korea is also gradually tightening the regulations

on the production of disposable products in order to reduce the consumption of

it. Korean Ministry of Environment announced a policy that bans the production of

disposable straws in earnest of 2022. This is due to the significant increase of

awareness towards the harmfulness of disposable plastic straws.. Korea has already

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