The Japanese philosophy for a no-waste world
bbc.com
bbc.com
I get that compared to the US the recycling here might be better (and yeah, I do need to separate my trash), but this is pure "oh so mysterious and oriental Japan so great" article. What help is recycling for if you're producing insane amounts of unnecessary waste.
Hard to keep a straight face reading that headline with that image burned in my mind.
[0] https://ibeantravelling.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/6e290558...
There's also a huge amount of plastic kitsch in Japan.
We probably are seeing more plastic-wrapped fruits and vegetables in the US. Part of it is probably there a certain amount of pressure to make everything barcoded for quicker checkout--especially at self-checkouts.
But from what I can tell they still produce far less plastic waste per capita than Americans (about half, before disposal/recycling/incineration): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/plastic-waste-per-capita
IMO plastic is not that bad if it gets recycled or used as fuel source in power plants instead of becoming landfill.
On the other hand there are vending machines for various drinks (not all in plastic admittedly) on almost every other Japanese street corner. So I'm not sure how it averages out.
Our World In Data sites a 2015 study [1] which in turn cites an 2012 World Bank report [2] for some of its data, including the numbers for Japan. This then in turn cites OECD data without a solid link, but a search and some digging leads us to [3]. This data is acquired through questionnaire (there's some info available in the data explorer), so the trail runs cold there.
I did cross-check with the numbers of the Central Bureau of Statistics of the Netherlands, and the overall waste production matches: an average 532 kg of waste per capita, ~17 million people leads to about 9000 million tons of waste per year.
However, I cannot find the fraction of plastic waste on the OECD site anywhere. If I use the Dutch CBS data (counting "Kunststof verpakkingen", "PMD-fractie", and "Harde plastics"), the Dutch fraction of municipal waste that is plastic-related seems to be only about 4%, which is 5 times fewer than the World Bank report lists.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1260352
[2] https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/1a4...
[3] https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?fs[0]=Topic%2C1%7CEnviron...
[4] https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/83452NED?dl=41FD6
that's it, that's the whole thing... everything else is like the rural theme park imagination of what japan is
In the west, when we see plastic, we think of litter. And we should, because there's way too many coffee cups, cigarette butts, and fast food wrappers lying on the ground in our towns and cities.
But in Japan people don't litter. So when they see plastic, it's associated with clean new products. The trash still ends up in the ocean, but they don't see it happen - out of sight out of mind.
The amount of overpackaging in that country is absolutely insane. But counterintuitively, they're going to have a hard time getting rid of it. Here, there's a decent amount of public consent for paper straws, biodegradable packaging materials, etc, thanks to the cultural guilt we have because we're surrounded by litter. Over there, people "do their part" by simply not littering - but that's not good enough.
Huh? As you say, Japan doesn't litter. And AFAIK Japan incinerates most/all of its plastic waste. They don't exactly have the land to landfill. So very little, if any, is ending up in the ocean.
Europe may not be much better in producing, consuming, recycling or otherwise handling waste (and could easily be worse? I don't know how to measure this) but there's a tendency in "the west" to mysticise Japan and I don't know if it's helpful to do so in general, but particularly in this case.
Rubbish bins were common in railway stations and other public places until the sarin terrorist attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995, after which most were removed for security reasons. Trashcans are a bit more common now than they were in the first few years after those attacks, but they can indeed still be hard to find. Just a couple of days ago, I was surprised to spot a garbage can on the sidewalk on Omotesando. I had a used facemask in my pocket, so I dropped it in.
https://www.core77.com/posts/125980/This-Japanese-Town-Sorts....)
> 12. Unrecyclable garbage that can only be landfilled: Seashells, nail polish, chemical hand warmers, ...
Surely there is a better place for seashells than a landfill?
* https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220823-quitting-single-...
In past decades earthquake building codes evolved a lot, and who would want to live a structure that probably had 'less resilient' capabilities (assuming an insurance company would even give you coverage for older construction).