Missorting was easy to spot, given the required use of clear garbage bags with identification numbers.
...
...umm, I don't think I'd want an identification number on my trash. Yikes!
Posted on 05/11/2005 7:57:59 PM PDT by saquin
YOKOHAMA, Japan - When this city recently doubled the number of garbage categories to 10, it handed residents a 27-page booklet on how to sort their trash. Highlights included detailed instructions on 518 items.
Lipstick goes into burnables; lipstick tubes, "after the contents have been used up," into "small metals" or plastics. Take out your tape measure before tossing a kettle: under 12 inches, it goes into small metals, but over that it goes into bulky refuse.
Socks? If only one, it is burnable; a pair goes into used cloth, though only if the socks "are not torn, and the left and right sock match." Throw neckties into used cloth, but only after they have been "washed and dried."
"It was so hard at first," said Sumie Uchiki, 65, whose ward began wrestling with the 10 categories last October as part of an early trial. "We were just not used to it. I even needed to wear my reading glasses to sort out things correctly."
To Americans struggling with sorting trash into a few categories, Japan may provide a foretaste of daily life to come. In a national drive to reduce waste and increase recycling, neighborhoods, office buildings, towns and megalopolises are raising the number of trash categories - sometimes to dizzying heights.
Indeed, Yokohama, with 3.5 million people, appears slack compared with Kamikatsu, a town of 2,200 in the mountains of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands. Not content with the 34 trash categories it defined four years ago as part of a major push to reduce waste, Kamikatsu has gradually raised the number to 44.
In Japan, the long-term push to sort and recycle aims to reduce the amount of garbage that ends up in incinerators. In land-scarce Japan, up to 80 percent of garbage is incinerated, while a similar percentage ends up in landfills in the United States.
The environmentally friendlier process of sorting and recycling may be more expensive than dumping, experts say, but it comparable in cost to incineration.
"Sorting trash is not necessarily more expensive than incineration," said Hideki Kidohshi, a garbage researcher at the Center for the Strategy of Emergence at the Japan Research Institute. "In Japan, sorting and recycling will make further progress."
For Yokohama, the goal is to reduce incinerated garbage by 30 percent over the next five years. But Kamikatsu's goal is even more ambitious: eliminating garbage by 2020.
In the last four years, Kamikatsu has halved the amount of incinerator-bound garbage and raised its recycled waste to 80 percent, town officials said. Each household now has a subsidized garbage disposal unit that recycles raw garbage into compost.
At the single Garbage Station where residents must take their trash, 44 bins collect everything from tofu containers to egg cartons, plastic bottle caps to disposable chopsticks, fluorescent tubes to futons.
On a recent morning, Masaharu Tokimoto, 76, drove his pick-up truck to the station and expertly put brown bottles in their proper bin, clear bottles in theirs. He looked at the labels on cans to determine whether they were aluminum or steel. Flummoxed about one item, he stood paralyzed for a minute before mumbling to himself, "This must be inside."
Some 15 minutes later, Mr. Tokimoto was done. The town had gotten much cleaner with the new garbage policy, he said, though he added: "It's a bother, but I can't throw away the trash in the mountains. It would be a violation."
In towns and villages where everybody knows one another, not sorting may be unthinkable. In cities, though, not everybody complies, and perhaps more than any other act, sorting out the trash properly is regarded as proof that one is a grown-up, responsible citizen. The young, especially bachelors, are notorious for not sorting. And landlords reluctant to rent to non-Japanese will often explain that foreigners just cannot - or will not - sort their trash.
In Yokohama, after a few neighborhoods started sorting last year, some residents stopped throwing away their trash at home. Garbage bins at parks and convenience stores began filling up mysteriously with unsorted trash.
"So we stopped putting garbage bins in the parks," said Masaki Fujihira, who oversees the promotion of trash sorting at Yokohama City's family garbage division.
Enter the garbage guardians, the army of hawk-eyed volunteers across Japan who comb offending bags for, say, a telltale gas bill, then nudge the owner onto the right path.
One of the most tenacious around here is Mitsuharu Taniyama, 60, the owner of a small insurance business who drives around his ward every morning and evening, looking for missorted trash. He leaves notices at collection sites: "Mr. So-and-so, your practice of sorting out garbage is wrong. Please correct it."
"I checked inside bags and took especially lousy ones back to the owners' front doors," Mr. Taniyama said.
He stopped in front of one messy location where five bags were scattered about, and crows had picked out orange peels from one.
"This is a typical example of bad garbage," Mr. Taniyama said, with disgust. "The problem at this location is that there is no community leader. If there is no strong leader, there is chaos."
He touched base with his lieutenants in the field. On the corner of a street with large houses, where the new policy went into effect last October, Yumiko Miyano, 56, was waiting with some neighbors.
Ms. Miyano said she now had 90 percent compliance, adding that, to her surprise, those resisting tended to be "intellectuals," like a certain university professor or an official at Japan Airlines up the block.
"But the husband is the problem - the wife sorts her trash properly," one neighbor said of the airlines family.
Getting used to the new system was not without its embarrassing moments.
Shizuka Gu, 53, said that early on, a community leader sent her a letter reprimanding her for not writing her identification number on the bag with a "thick felt-tip pen." She was chided for using a pen that was "too thin."
"It was a big shock to be told that I had done something wrong," Ms. Gu said. "So I couldn't bring myself to take out the trash here and asked my husband to take it to his office. We did that for one month."
At a 100-family apartment complex not too far away, Sumishi Kawai was keeping his eyes trained on the trash site before pickup. Missorting was easy to spot, given the required use of clear garbage bags with identification numbers. Compliance was perfect - almost.
One young couple consistently failed to properly sort their trash. "Sorry! We'll be careful!" they would say each time Mr. Kawai knocked on their door holding evidence of their transgressions.
At last, even Mr. Kawai - a small 77-year-old man with wispy white hair, an easy smile and a demeanor that can only be described as grandfatherly - could take no more.
"They were renting the apartment, so I asked the owner, 'Well, would it be possible to have them move?' " Mr. Kawai said, recalling, with undisguised satisfaction, that the couple was evicted two months ago.
Missorting was easy to spot, given the required use of clear garbage bags with identification numbers.
......umm, I don't think I'd want an identification number on my trash. Yikes!
We had an engineer from Japan at our manufacturing plant one day. He looked at our operation, and remarked, "We waste so much energy! In Japan we shut down everything during breaks to save oil!"
We can learn something from these people!
LOL ;-D
That's why I lived in Kyoto: The city of Carbon Dioxide reduction is also the city of no trash separation.
Trash cops, trash cops...watcha gonna do?
Refrigerator magnets would solve this terrible dilemma!
Regardless of the argued value of recycling...I think there is something in "thinking" people that thinks it is wrong to waste...
Nonetheless...I live in one of the BLUE-est neighborhoods in one of the BLUE-est cities on the planet with almost all 20-something residents...(think Seattle)
Do you think they recycle...hell, no!!!...not even simple stuff like paper, cans, glass.
I go down to my garage and am just appalled. Like I say, there are cost arguments about recycling...but jerks aren't making a statement about that...they just don't give a SH*T.
Also, their cigarette CR*P is everywhere....
In Okinawa a couple of months ago a US Sailor was murdered, found stabbed to death by Marines. It took a couple of weeks to solve this "who dunnit". The suspects (other US Sailors) advised that since they watched "CSI Miami", they had disposed of all their bloody clothes, knives, etc. in trash bags and dumped them at a Japanese garbage station off base. Even after two weeks the evidence was all still there...the Japanese garbagemen never picked up the stuff, because it was unsorted in the worng color bags. Very ironic. Semper Fidelis.
Why do I have the feeling that when they start telling me to sort every miniscule item of my trash that would be the moment I start throwing my trash in the middle of the street in the middle of the night.
If you can get evicted for not "properly sorting" your damned trash, whats next for the PC nanny police?
Recycling will only work, and is only useful, when there is an economic incentive. (Or intense social pressure of the sort that can exist in Japan, but probably not even in small towns here.)
If one lives in a densely populated area, where waste removal is a muncipal service, where landfill space at reasonable cost is very far away, it makes economic sense to subsidize recycling, so long as the cost the municipality is reduced. Part of the savings should be passed on to residents who recycle as an incentive. (No need for the recycling police.)
In places where waste removal is privately contracted, if recycling is cheaper, the private companies can offer discounts to recyclers.
I've always been mystified by people who think that somehow resources are wasted by being put in landfills. No so: if the price of resources commonly put into landfills rises enough, yesterday's landfills will become tomorrow's mines. (The way some people behave, you'd think the stuff was being rocketed to the sun.)
Japanese bureaucrats sit around in their tower building offices everyday thinking of ridiculous new ways to justify their existence ...Police nanny state indeed ...
I recommend everyone to John Tierney's work in The New York Times Magazine on recycling. Far from a lefist approach...Tierney said recycling was an economic waste of time and money.
I believe him...but in my upbringing, it was always, "waste not, want not."
http://www.williams.edu/HistSci/curriculum/101/garbage.html
Recycling Is Garbage
Rinsing out tuna cans and tying up newspapers may make you feel virtuous, but recycling could be America's most wasteful activity.
more at above link
I think I already agreed with the article, except in a very circumscribed set of circumstances in which there is an economic benefit (and which, by and large don't apply anywhere in the US, except *possibly* the north-east corridor and the LA basin).
The one thing that's worth separating from your trash to recycle is alumnium: but unless they're giving you a discount on trash hauling, keep it yourself, and sell it at a paying recycling center.
After posting that, I recalled a child-hood memory: we used to save aluminum, and collect scrap metal--aluminum and copper--on walks round the small town I grew up in (and the one across the river, and surrounding countryside). It felt virtuous (the town had less litter thanks to our family) and paid, not enough to make it really worthwhile, but enough to put in a bias in favor of the extra exercise one got on walks by carrying bag and occasionally bending to pick up an errant bit of metal.
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