Campaigners with the climate action group KPOP 4 PLANET stand outside the HYBE headquarters with discarded K-pop albums as part of a campaign to raise awareness around bulk buying.Inside a Toronto bubble tea café, Ash Ledoux flips through a photo album with a group of friends.
When she first became a fan of Korean pop music, Ledoux says she felt pressure to purchase each version of her favourite artists' new releases. But as time went on, she eased up on her consumption.Ash Ledoux, bottom left, along with friends Joanna Li, Mehak Sidhu and Eliana Nassar show off their K-pop albums and merchandise at a Toronto bubble tea cafe.
As part of the campaign, organizers collected more than 8,000 unwanted K-pop albums from fans and delivered them to South Korean entertainment companies including HYBE, JYP and SM Entertainment as a way to illustrate the amount of waste they create. "[Fans] recognize that their favourite idols are also a product of this neoliberal capitalist industry. These [album] charts become a criteria [for] measuring the idol's popularity and the fandom's power," Jeong said.