Here in South Korea, recycling seems to be purely a business. From what people have told me, there is no kind of government recycling program, all recycling is done by private establishments which are essentially in it for the money.
For example, if you want to recycle bottles, you can either take them back to the supermarket where you bought them, and the supermarket will buy them back from you, or you can take them to a garage which will sort them and sell them to a company which makes things out of them. Usually large apartment buildings will get together and recycle informally. Someone knows someone who can use something, old paper or whatever, so that person gathers all the paper from the apartment. (This is South Korea, so by "large apartment buildings" I mean thirty to sixty floors and a few hundred families . . . and that's just my small town!).
Generally, I love the idea of capitalist recycling. However, as I don't live in one of those huge apartment buildings, the supermarket doesn't take back bottles, and noone seems to know where there's a sorting garage, I'm finding it very hard to recycle. I don't have a car, so I can't exactly take my recycling to another town. I was a bit disappointed that the most common response to my question about how to recycle my plastic bottles and paper was, "Why not just put it in the trash?"