Tokyo’s trash-collecting samurai takes a fun approach to cleanup
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I do not find it sad but it does give me endless stuff to think about.
One thing is that when people litter (or leave dog poop on the grass) they sort of think they're "getting away with it" because no one will catch them. I realized that's a childish perspective on morality, the reason not to litter is that it improves the quality of your community- not to avoid punishment!
Another thing I think about is how we're all interconnected, and there are a million dimensions where you have to pull your weight or else someone else ends up with your extra burden. This is again especially apparent with children, who innocently leave messes or avoid chores, without realizing that what they're doing is assigning the chore to a parent.
I think of all these people littering as not pulling their weight in the dimension of litter, but that makes me think that in other areas they might be pulling extra weight, like they're in a rush because their employer doesn't pay enough for them to outsource their tasks, or they're using alcohol as a coping mechanism and need to sneak their beers in the car and can't bring the cans in the house to throw them away. And the worst case is someone who is sort of burned out on the web of interconnectedness, and not pulling their weigh in any dimension, being a burden on everyone else. That's kind of sad but it doesn't make me hate those people because I've been that guy at times in my life, and now I can at least pay back the loans I've taken in some small way.
It's very frustrating to see people comment about this stuff on a neighborhood subreddit or next door. It's a predictable cycle. Whether it's people littering or whether there's a windy trash day, people complain about trash on the sidewalk and about how it's a sign the city has gone to the dogs. I will suggest they can pick it up if it bothers them so much, let alone out of a sense civic pride, they act like I took their first born! I just don't get it...
I got the grabber stick in physical therapy though, and found a bucket in the alley and it clicked. That made cleaning stuff far more realistic.
I pick stuff up occasionally but I can't make up for a city of people who don't care to pick up their own trash. If I complain about it and you suggest in anyway that if I cared I should pickup after grown adults who don't care to act in a basic civilized manner I would find that very grating.
Civic pride needs to be collective.
It's actually really simple.
Imagine you have a co-worker that doesn't do their job. You complain about it and are told "well, you have time enough to complain, maybe you could take on some of his tasks." Now you're doing the job of two people and the colleague continues avoiding accountability for his incompetence.
It's bully logic. The problem isn't that I'm punching you, it's that you're being too loud in crying about it.
Burdening critics with extra work is not the solution to upstream problems. The problem is people littering, not a lack of people willing to pick it up.
The residents of your neighborhood will collectively decide what kind of neighborhood they live in by the actions they take. Whether you find this morally offensive, morally harmonious, or some complicated other combination doesn't affect the brute fact of the matter.
This means things don't improve!
Thanks for sharing your perspective, I think I'm going to look at it differently from now on.
but it also feels bad if you see more trash you could grab and can't fit it in the bucket anymore
Otherwise you want something bigger, preferably on wheels. Though you can do the classic where you fill bags and leave them by the road and come back later to pick them up in a vehicle.
You can even get permission from the city to drive down bike paths to pick them up, though a cart on a bike would probably work as well.
Not really. I think only 10 states have plastic bottle deposits, and I have really no clue if those are convenient for folks. I'm not from one of those states: You could take aluminum cans to get money, but it isn't convenient.
(In my current location, I can just take plastic and aluminum bottles to a grocery store to get the deposit back by feeding them into a machine. And most folks do this)
We have to take everything to the recycling center, wait in a long-ass line and they pay by weight, not item.
It's not worth my time to bring single bags nor worth the space to hoard them at home so I just trade them to the neighborhood homeless guy for expired dog food and other sundries.
And it is by item - less money for small bottles (single serve soda, for example) and more money for larger bottles (1L of soda or juice). Aluminum is similar.
In Michigan (10c deposit), grocery stores have dedicated areas for machines that receive the bottles and give you the credit back. I grew up setting cans aside for return (and having dedicated bins for folks parking for sport events, with proceeds going towards e.g. Cub Scouts and similar)
In CA (5c deposit), apparently you have to take your recyclables to a recycle center, where I think they pay based on weight. I've never bothered.
And it is true there will be people picking through public trash cans, in both situations.
On the other hand, in Belgium it's pretty normal to keep your case of empty beer bottles and return them at the grocery store when you go the next time.
There's definitely something cultural at play. I wonder if the strong capitalistic ideals in the US make it seem like a low-return effort or if it's looked down upon like going through trash. We also simply waste a lot of things in the US (food, throw-away culture, fast casual clothing, disposable electronics), so it may just be an extension of that too.
But this varies a lot state-to-state. In San Francisco, it seemed to be the poor with carts picking up cans. (And the recycling company wanted you to report people for digging through the bins.) I think the deposit was rather low there and had no idea where you can return them to.
But on the other hand, it's tragic that people are so desperate for the small sums to be had from recycling that they spend their days digging through other peoples' trash like that.
Not all of them are destitute. There are collectors who now own homes thanks to bottle and can deposits. My neighbors across the street moved in few years ago and I saw the garage open - front to back, side to side, top to bottom PACKED with bags of bottles and cans. Thousands of them. Spoke to their neighbor and they told him collecting bottles paid for most of the house. Few blocks down there's an apartment building with ground level garages and again, one of them is fully packed with bags of bottles and cans - plans in motion. This is in NYC too.
Imagine how clean the planet would be if all packaging had a deposit.
I hate this bleeding heart crap. As I said before, If they went though it and CLEANED UP after themselves, I woulda turned a blind eye or maybe even set the cans aside in the future. These assholes made me spend my Saturday morning cleaning up trash scattered all over my front yard. You're damn right I'n not going to life a finger to help them.
you ever stop for a second and think that maybe there's a reason no one respects them?
PS: all for expanding the social safety net and creating programs to give people who want a leg up but I have no sympathy for people who Choose to be homeless and be a permanent drain on society. SF already spends more money per capita on homeless than students. enough is enough.
Even in the small town where I live upstate, some folks deposit cans for a bit of extra income. It's a useful program.
edit: looked it up, apparently originally Swedish
Already 20 pieces of junk on the ground, whatever, one more is 5% of the total.
Nothing there, My thing would be 100% of the junk on the ground, can't do that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
> In criminology, the broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes.
The same probably applies to things like littering as well, somewhat.
That said, it’s hard to imagine that excess litter collection could lead to minorities getting bashed by the police.
I'm not trying to argue against the premise above that seeing litter makes people more likely to litter; in fact, I agree with it. Humans are monkey-see monkey-do creatures. The problem is that "monkey sees broken window, monkey does murder" is not how this works. It's a weirdly authoritarian way of thinking that suggests that criminality is not only objective, but a tidy spectrum.
I am on the verge of doing something like this along a through-way in our neighborhood. I think I could probably get a lot of buy-in from the community.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/shortcuts/2014/jul/31/davi...
Next time I have to “pick up trash”, I will try to think “what would these samurai do?”
IIRC, part of the reason for no trash cans is that eating in public is sort of taboo - you do it at a resto or at home. Food wrappers are quite a lot of trash people need to throw away.
From my last trip to Tokyo I recall vending machines having both garbage and recycling bins. So just keep an eye out for vending machines.
Agreed, but ironically Japan is the country I've visited that was the worst for this. Everything is wrapped, inside something wrapped, inside something wrapped. Each individual piece of candy is wrapped. Then 5 pieces are wrapped together. Then you have multiple of those again in a bag, etc. etc.
Not really. The main reason there are no trash cans in public is the 1995 sarin gas attack.
"A Terrorist Attack Led Japan to Remove All Its Trash Cans. Now They're Making a Comeback."
https://psmag.com/environment/trash-cans-are-coming-back-to-...
They do not. They're all recycling only.
Sarcasm aside, eating and drinking in public is considered rude. Every single station will have places for tossing most recyclable, nearly every vending machine has recyclable trash cans for the products they sell, and outside of the most drunken areas the conbinis will have trash cans on the inside for all forms of garbage.
- The convenience stores closest to areas that tend to have a lot of tourists, along with not allowing access to toilets, tend to not have their trash cans out either.
- You have to know to go into a convenience store
- The trash bins near vending machines are for cups, so when you have the rice ball wrapper on you, it's a whole thing.
I do think it's very manageable when you know but It did not really "get" the trash strategy until someone pointed it out to me. Every day somebody is born that doesn't know to walk to the back of the Family Mart to find the trashcan
There's also a structural problem imposed by Japan's rigorous management of solid waste in urban areas. Single-stream disposal practically doesn't exist. If a municipality placed general waste bins on corners (as seen in many western urban areas), they'd have to have folks manually sorting whatever ends up in them, which isn't economical.
When in Rome.
There are always trashcans in the convenience stores though, especially near the microwaves and coffee machines.
Especially if they then install some trash cans (that actually get emptied).
Suffice to say, he barely picked anything up.
Always some requirement for "propriety". Wish more places would accept the concept of making work enjoyable.
I often pick trash left by other people, and I always make a very annoyed face, not really because I'm annoyed but to signal that it is not OK.
0: @lixolino at instagram
I didn't know samurai wore denim coats, leather boots and fedora hats!
I know it's disappointing, sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
So we have a short window for a very accurate historical novel …
I do completely agree that it was not a smooth time period by any means.
Just to put in context how weird this is: a Russian royal got attacked and left with a permanent scar because of the domestic policy of Japan.
I see a trend.
But I’m surprised they’re finding trash— Japan is very clean and orderly country
Even in the suburbs and countryside, people illegally dump trash all the time because they don't want to pay to dispose of it properly. Anywhere you go, you will see signs imploring, "don't throw away your trash here!" under which are mounds of trash.
It may be true that Japan is on average a bit cleaner than other countries, but not nearly so much as people seem to think.
It's not an occasional wrapper. It's the block of cheese I finished off when cooking dinner yesterday, the container of mushrooms I emptied, the bag of tortillas. Most household trash just changed from "toss in the trash and it gets dumped somewhere" to "bring to someone to check each item for completeness"?
I'm sure we'd end up with a lot less single-use packaging as a result, but we use single-use packaging for a reason and your proposal amounts to a near-ban. Let's not pretend this is a simple "just charge a deposit and littering stops". It's "charge a deposit, discover the deposit is non-viable, and single-use packaging as a whole stops".
The other commenter's "just put a QR code" helps a lot, but it still makes household trash much more burdensome than the current "put it in a bin and someone collects it" system. How much would you pay to not have to take your kitchen trash somewhere and scan each piece? That's the overhead here.
(Also I have 666 reputation right now, please don't ruin it)
I used to work at FAANG there, one of the managers was a fun guy. For a month he committed to do the same thing as the people who collect cans - every 04:00am he went around town, collecting bottles and cans. Turns out you can easily make 100-200eur a day with this. But it's a highly competitive business.
There even was/is a bit of a campaign to promote that, e.g. with slogans on bottle labels. Some places also have started putting up small "bottle racks" with trash cans.
I've lived in Germany, and this was one of the things I quickly adopted after seeing the locals doing it. An interesting anecdote is that can/bottle collectors always approached me asking if I'm finished with my drink (I had a drink outside almost daily), but I never felt threatened or anything. They were generally super polite, I'd usually reply with "I'll leave it here" and they went along their way. Very different experience than anywhere else!
It went over like a loud fart in a crowded church.
(I voted for it because so many homeless and poor people collect bottles and cans for income.)
Imagine the person going from the night shift at Walmart to opening a Wendy’s, they’re getting a coffee and a packaged breakfast at a convenience store on the way to work - they need to give up a buck on each item out of their minimum wage income, then stop at a deposit location on their way home in the brief window between shifts and childcare.
I see where you’re going with the idea, but at least in America I don’t think it works in practice with the current state of income and financial stability disparity.
I doubt any meaningful reform on any issue will not disproportionally affect poor people.
this is probably why the government simply does nothing instead due to the endless bike shedding by constituents.!
I don't think I get the idea. Do you have any evidence to support the claim that charging a poll tax on the purchase of all consumables is a more efficient and effective way to assist the poor than to provide jobs for unemployed people to pick up trash? Introducing such a policy would add a flat tax to tons of the purchases in our economy, I think declaring outright it's the best solution for the impoverished demands a little more supporting evidence than logical sounding rhetoric.
>the government simply does nothing
I guess it depends when and where you grew up, but in my lifetime litter improved significantly compared to how it was when I was growing up in the 90s in Connecticut, and from what I understand it was the result of government-funded marketing campaigns and increased fines and enforcements for littering on public roadways. "Don't Mess with Texas" actually started as a government-funded anti-littering campaign.[0]
Neither of us are in the government (as far as I know), so I think all we can really do right now is discuss our bike-shed designs for solving this problem. If you have any information about why you hold these opinions, I'd be interested to read it - otherwise I don't think we have much to talk about.
I did not claim that a poll tax (which again is called a deposit fee) is more efficient than providing jobs for unemployed people to pick up trash.
In any case bottle deposits are already known to be effective:
https://www.bottlebill.org/index.php/about-bottle-bills/myth...
In any case your entire argument could be made about taxes in general. why tax poor people at all? why should the poor pay sales tax? tax does disproportionally affect the poor. if so, how do you plan on making up the revenue? I would assume taxing the middle class and rich? the mere math is such that any sweeping action will disproportionally affect the poor simply because most Americans are poor. the only viable thing then is to do nothing.
Retail sales tax is not universally implemented across the United States, so is at least not essential to the financial solvency of a government. My objection isn't to the general notion of taxing poor people, but of introducing taxes that disproportionately burden the poor. A poll tax disproportionately burdens the poor because it introduces a flat bill paid by everyone regardless of income. A tax introducing a flat bill on all consumable purchases disproportionately burdens people who make more consumable purchases and who have less opportunity to return consumable purchases for the deposit, in addition to disproportionately burdening people for whom 10% or a minimum of $1 is a bigger and more essential portion of their daily income.
Your source from the Container Recycling Institute is supportive of bottle deposits, but bottle deposits are usually 5c a container, not 10% or a minimum of $1, are far less universal than a tax across all consumables, and only implemented in 10 states so far.
>In any case your entire argument could be made about taxes in general.
Only if you simplify it to the point of reducing it to a strawman. I'm trying to be as specific about my critique here as possible: I don't think charging everyone a "a 10 percent or at least a dollar deposit" on every consumable is going to reduce litter effectively without disproportionately burdening the poor, and I think proposing such an egregiously steep and broad tax as a reasonable policy ignores the realities of the people it would disproportionately punish.
Edit:
>any sweeping action will disproportionally affect the poor simply because most Americans are poor. the only viable thing then is to do nothing.
I would request some evidence on this one, too. 55% of workers are paid hourly, and only 1.5% are on minimum wage. Obviously the poverty line excludes a lot of people we would probably consider "poor" but that's still 11.4% of the country. From what I can tell, this claim and your defeatist conclusion from it have no basis, like your earlier claim that the government "does nothing" to address litter.
[0]https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27... [1]https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2020/home.htm
not to mention, again, it's not a tax, it's a fee, that is given back to you if you want the money back. poor people inherently would be most incentivized to return the packaging thus making the issue moot and your issue irrelevant. or, more pleasantly, stop the consumption of consumables such as soda and fast food that affects them the most anyway in the form of disproportionally high rates of diabetes, obesity and low life expectancy.
I don't know what the implementation is like in the USA, but perhaps it's an inconvenient implementation that's to blame, rather than the entire concept?
I guess a big difference is that in Europe, I can just walk 5 minutes to the nearest supermarket and deposit the recycling there. I think if the basic infrastructure is set up correctly, recycling is easy. It's the same amount of effort as throwing away non-recyclable waste.
In Denmark, small shops must refund at least the bottles they sell. Normal or large shops must refund all deposit bottles and cans.
Most people take the empties to a supermarket. People drinking in a public place often leave them for bottle collectors (often homeless etc) to gather.