Sorting trash in Japan

I've recently been doing a bit of purging in my apartment, sorting through the small mountains of stuff that have slowly been collecting over the past two years of living here. Most of it is paper - old envelopes, magazines, junk mail, phone books, out-of-date tourist info and maps, old cards, half-finished lesson plans, and an overwhelming number of calendars, teaching resource books and "JET Journals" the good folks at CLAIR just keep on sending to us, year after year. Seriously, who needs FIVE calendars? I can understand one, maybe two (a big one to hang on your wall, and maybe a smaller one for your desk). They're quite pretty and useful in that they have all the Japanese holidays written in them. But five? Really? In a tiny Japanese apartment? They do suggest in the accompanying letter (itself a nice addition to my growing pile) that you can give the ones you don't need to coworkers and friends. But who am I supposed to be giving them to, really? Everything's written in English and all the people I know who could use an English calendar have themselves been inundated with too many. So we all end up with piles of unwanted crap, and nowhere to throw it away.

Which brings me to yet another interesting phenomena in Japan. People love packaging in this country. They LOVE IT. I suppose it's partly due to the culture of gift-giving here, in which case it's nice to have things in little individual packages. Makes sense for things like omiyage (souvenirs) or perhaps the odd, easily-perishable item that might go bad in relatively high (as compared with Denver, anyway) humidity. Box-lunches that benefit from a small self-contained snack also spring to mind. But the over packaging doesn't stop there. Everything comes individually wrapped. Buy a box of cookies? Open it up and you'll find 12 individually wrapped little snacks. Want some tissues? Here, have a box with 5 more boxes inside. How about a box of pens? Inside you'll find 20 pens that come in their own plastic bags. And don't even get me started on how those boxes of pens are themselves coated in plastic shrink-wrap.

As an environmentalist, I certainly have plenty to gripe about with such an gross example of wasteful packaging, strictly on moral grounds. But if I get off my high-horse and speak as a person living here, it's just plain hard to throw anything away. In this culture of over packaging, there are virtually NO TRASH CANS anywhere.

It's kind of a big joke amongst the foreign population, how we all end up carting around loads of garbage in our bags until we find a place to get rid of it. Out in public this usually takes the form of the convenience store, which is one of the only places you can ever find to get rid of your trash.


photo from julie in japan

You may have noticed that those aren't just ordinary trash cans. They're set up for you to sort your unwanted goods, in addition to getting rid of them. This applies equally for public trash cans and disposing of garbage at home, so I'll just focus on what it takes to get rid of the stuff from my apartment.

One of the biggest surprises I had waiting for me when I first moved here was the "garbage list". Which looks like this

Basically, what we have are:
燃えるごみ (moeru gomi), burnable garbage like kitchen waste, tissues, bedding, etc.
燃えないごみ (moenai gomi), non-burnable garbage like broken glass, rubber, non-recyclable plastic and metal (like jar lids), broken plates, etc.
プラ (pura), plastics
PET bottles, aka plastic pop/tea/juice bottles
紙 (kami), paper items like empty ice cream cups, paper bags, and paperboard boxes
瓶 (kame), glass bottles
缶 (kan), aluminum cans/metal
紙パック (kami paku), milk and juice cartons
資源ごみ (shigen gomi), recyclable materials (like all that office paper I've got)

The way you pay for your trash removal is actually a pretty good system, IMO. Instead of paying a monthly fee for however much you want to toss, you pay for the bags you use to put the trash out. Without the proper bag, they won't pick up your garbage. In addition, each household is allotted a certain amount of "trash stickers" to be used for the burnable and non-burnable trash. If, by some aberration of nature, you actually manage to use up all of the stickers they give you, I'm not really sure what happens. I've never even come close to it in my two years here.

Anyway, I was really fortunate in that the girl in my position before me was incredibly organized and left for me a pretty easy system for coping with the "list". I've got boxes under my sink for plastics, PET bottles, and boxboard. The burnable trash goes in the regular trash-can with a lid. In one of my closets I have boxes for aluminum cans/ metal and glass bottles, and a small box for non-burnables. I've only thrown the cans and bottles once or twice, and I've yet to collect enough non-burnable trash to make it worthwhile to bag up and put out. At least before the purge, heh heh heh.

In addition to the trash stickers, everybody gets a schedule for when to put their trash out. Burnables are taken twice a week, and everything else is on kind of a rotating system. It's pretty logical, put the separated trash in the appropriately colored clear-plastic bag, and in the case of burnable or non-burnable trash, a sticker showing your name and address. And if you've put something in there that shouldn't be there, technically somebody can return your trash to you for you to sort out before throwing it away again. Although I've snuck in the occasional junk-mail into the burnable garbage here and there, it's never been returned to me, and I see bags in the trash cans all the time that clearly have not been sorted properly.

All of this is to say, that although I've purged my shelves of all this paper, it still hasn't left my apartment. It's currently sitting in three nicely-loaded bags, waiting to be bundled in twine and taken over to the drop-off place. And there they shall sit for now, for recyclable materials like office paper and milk cartons are only collected once a month; and that day doesn't come again until November 14.

*sigh*