Beneath

We’re a team of students and volunteers in Seoul who decided to do something about the waste our cafés throw out every day.

What we
throw away
comes back

2024

Volunteers gathered outside a Seoul café with collection bags on a pickup morning.

2024

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

Chungpa-dong, Yongsan-gu

We started Beneath in 2024 with a handful of cafés in Chungpa-dong, Yongsan-gu. Waste doesn’t disappear when we throw it away, and the burden usually lands on the communities that produced the least of it.

That’s what we mean by climate inequality. So we started where waste is thrown out.

Beneath, 2024

“What a neighbourhood throws away comes back to it.”

Collect, recycle, distribute

That became our cycle: we collect cartons and coffee grounds from cafés, our recycling partners process them, and we turn them into things people actually use. We keep a record of every step.

A café owner handing a bag of rinsed cartons across the counter.
Our first partners were cafés in Chungpa-dong. They rinse and flatten the cartons, and we come and pick them up.
Two blue crates filled with rinsed, flattened paper cartons, photographed from above.

2024

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

Café by café

Every café that joined got its own collection bag, and we kept inviting new cafés until the route filled out.

March 2026

Volunteers carrying collection bags of used cartons along a Chungpa-dong street.

A weekly route

In March 2026 we opened our first weekly volunteer route, in Chungpa-dong.

May 2026

Yeonhui-dong from above: the streets and rooftops of the second collection route.

Yeonhui-dong, Seodaemun-gu

In May 2026 we launched our second route, in Yeonhui-dong. Both now run every week, and anyone can join.

Today

Instagram post: trackers placed on 53 milk cartons across Seoul cafés.

Following the carton

We put trackers on 53 milk cartons from Seoul cafés to see where they actually end up.

Today

18,144

Cartons collected

That’s 604.5 kg in total, from 23 partner cafés.

Today

Inside a jjokbang room in Seoul: a bare bulb lit above a worn door, coats and a rucksack hung on the beams.

Back to the neighbourhood

Those cartons have been turned into 227 rolls of recycled tissue for local households, and have saved about 13 trees (1,500 cartons = 1 tree).