Tokyo - Garbage

The Schizophrenia of Recycling in Japan
Japan takes recycling more seriously than any country I've been to.  The rules are daunting and most foreigners don't do it correctly.  When Jean lived here previously, she messed it up so bad that she started taking her garbage to the train station and chucking it there.  Luckily, our landlady left us instructions in English.  All plastic items other than PET bottles have to be washed, dried and then cut into pieces and put in a special "plastic refuse" garbage bag.  After you remove the cap and labels from the PET bottles then wash and dry them out, you carry them to the local supermarket to throw them in a special recycling can.

Paper and cardboard have to be flattened out and put into a paper bag.  This includes, for example, milk cartons which you rinse out, dry and then cut open so they are flat.

At any given moment, things are hanging in the kitchen to dry.  On the left is an empty ground coffee bag, which will go into the "plastics" bag.  Tea bags have to be squeezed out and dried.  The label goes into the "paper" bag and the tea bag itself can either be put into the "burnables" bag or the "food trash" bag, which is composted and put in the garden.

"Burnables" are a last resort - kind of a test to see how well you recycle the rest.  You should try to have very little burnables at the end of the day.

This all seems wonderful and worthy but what's strange about it is how the stores and vendors do their utmost to make your recycling a nightmare.  If you go to a store to buy cookies, for example, you'll find that each cookie is wrapped individually, then put in a box, which is put in a plastic bag and then inside another pretty bag with handles.  As you watch them wrapping it you do the recycling calculus in your head and start to panic.

Another example is when you buy a slice of cake from a bakery.  A thin piece of plastic will be wrapped around the edge of the cake so the frosting doesn't get messed up.  They then place it in a box and ask you how long you'll be walking around before you eat it.  Based on your answer, they'll place from one to three ice packs in the cake box.  The cake box goes into a plastic bag then usually into a fancy carrying bag made out of paper.  You spend more time dealing with the recycling than eating the cake.  The worst part is you have to but open each ice pack, pour out the gel inside, then rinse out and dry the plastic wrapper.

At the grocery store I quickly learned how to say "we don't need any plastic bags."  We carry our own bag and, as most people do, we try to recycle as much as we can right in the store.  Excess wrapping and labels can be tossed in bins outside the store.

You throw out different trash on different days using color-coded garbage bags.  If you do it incorrectly, they simply don't pick it up.  So far, we are one for one.  We've put out one bag of plastics and it got picked up.