Student Network

Contribute

Search

THINGS JAPANESE: Segregated Disposal? (Translated from Japanese original)

Since the first of October, in Okazaki (where Yamasa is), rubbish disposal has become pretty severe. Burnable waste, unburnable waste and recyclable waste each has to be separated before being put out. For example, after lunch each day, where do you throw the mountain of PET bottles? Burnable? Unburnable, you might think. In fact, neither. Or rather, both. Not the easiest to understand, but firstly, the outside label is peeled off and thrown in burnable rubbish. The cap is then disposed of with unburnable rubbish, the inside of the bottle needs to be rinsed with water and has to be put out with recyclable waste. If you consider separated disposal of waste as for the good of the environment, it should be fairly easy to come to terms with. The major change this time is that rubbish has to be put out in transparent or translucent bags. For this reason, we can longer use the black plastic rubbish bags that we have come to know and love.

We've been using the last few black bags left over from last month in our office, but we haven't been able to put them out for collection. We had a pile of rubbish that filled two huge bags. If we could just put those in some large transparent bags and put them out that would solve the problem but unfortunately that kind of laziness would not be permitted (and would kind of defeat the object of the exercise), so we gave up on the idea. At that point, we had to swap the contents from the black bags which when opened let out an odour sufficient to make a skunk cringe, to the newly-bought transparent bags. The used black bags of course were thrown away as more rubbish. As far as the remaining unused black bags are concerned, there's nothing for it but to make holes for head and arms and use them as raincoats. Possibly, they could also double as witches' costumes for the upcoming Halloween Party. We believe in recycling after all.

People who really care about conservation rather than buying bags specifically for the purpose of throwing out rubbish use shopping bags etc. In fact, when it was announced that rubbish would have to be separated before being thrown out, supermarkets changed their shopping bags to transparent plastic. However, since your shopping is completely visible to everyone on your way home, it is no longer possible to head home walking as if you had bought a thick steak, with the cheapest packed lunch with the largest discount and probably outdated. From that point of view, it may all just be a new sales strategy based on people's vanity. As far as environmental problems go, in Japan it has become a habit after walking the dog for owners to collect and take home dog faeces for disposal; the bag of preference is generally a supermarket one. Consequently, transparent bags could lead to an increase in the number of embarrassed dogs walking home. (For your reference, please dispose of this as burnable waste.)

There are many countries around the world that separate waste and recycle for the good of the environment. Perhaps the main difference between Japan and other countries in implementation, is the neighbourhood elderly "ojiisan" who monitor the rubbish disposal points around the towns and wage a war to ensure segregation of waste at all costs. At Yamasa, Mr. Tou keeps an eye on the Villa rubbish site. However, it seems as if there is no one who really knows what is classified as burnable rubbish, what as unburnable rubbish, and so on. When it comes to vague or uncertain items (for example, plastic containers with paper labels etc.) the general solution for many people is to wrap things in newspaper and then throw them away with burnable rubbish, so that the actual amount off rubbish grows as a result. This is a problem, as shipping it to the Philippines has been shown to be illegal (several containers filled with garbage were returned to sender with a bill for transport costs earlier this year).

In Japan, rubbish collection is a municipal responsibility that is paid for through taxes. It is excellent that they are trying to find ways to save taxpayers' money, so burnable rubbish is collected just twice a week and unburnable rubbish just once a week. However, in summer fresh rubbish in the office goes off really quickly. We also want to conserve energy for the sake of the environment, naturally keeping the doors and windows closed when the air-conditioning is on, so this means that we spent most of the summer working through the pleasant smell of garbage slowly rotting in black plastic. Since rubbish collection is a municipal responsibility, one of the most interesting points is the rash of rules that is emanating from the Municipal Councils around the country. From municipality to municipality the rules governing incineration of waste materials varies, so that in one city the material collected as burnable elsewhere is classified as unburnable. Over the whole of the country this pattern of inconstancies is repeated. Personally cases like this have caused me to start thinking seriously about moving to a city where it is still legal to use the old black bags. I still have some left, after all.

Speaking of recycling waste, by chance, this usually very bureaucratic system was got around. If you remember in issue 12 of this newsletter, the "Things Japanese: Typhoons" article was about the storm of the century in Nagoya and the consequent flooding. It seems that a century's worth of rubbish was also created at the same time. Refrigerators, chests of drawers, futons, tatami mats, rice cookers, pot plants etc., virtually everything that was in many houses, was transformed into rubbish. After the calamity, an enormous amount of rubbish was disposed of by the victims so to make life slightly easier for them, it was decided that it was unnecessary to separate rubbish. The municipalities around Nagoya then helped out, accepting large amounts of waste (usually all rubbish generated within an area has to be disposed of within that area). For an area usually regulated by a huge bureaucracy, this was a rare example of the councils adapting to the actual situation. The catastrophe itself was clearly aggravated by bureaucracy's failure to respond to the situation; even such a small let-up by the monolithic bureaucracy left a lot of people with a feeling of having beaten the system.

(They were still very wet though.)

(If anyone else can work out how on earth to translate the last sentence of the last paragraph, you're doing better than I am.)