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Comment by asutekku | Hacker News Reader

I know these Japan stories for Americans might be awe-inspiring, but man if there isn't crap loads of waste from all the products they sell here. Yesterday during my grocery shopping each individual glass container product got its own separate paper bag, meat was given a plastic bag even thought it was already wrapped in plastic and my juices got another plastic bag. Even the wines I got were given this plastic wrap, just not to hit each other.

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.

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I’ve lived in Japan too and agree that they have a lot of plastic packaging on products.

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

How is that counted? The last time I was in Japan they still separated "burnable" and "non-burnable" waste. So if you burn the plastic, does it still count as waste?

IMO plastic is not that bad if it gets recycled or used as fuel source in power plants instead of becoming landfill.

They have so much plastic waste that they use it to build new islands in Japan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yumenoshima

Maybe we have more industrial plastic waste than Japan? My experiences in Japan are that they use many times more plastic packaging on products than we jse in the US. I find this data extremely hard to believe.

If I had to guess, it’s probably we (as in the US) consumes more. One takeout meal for my family is probably more plastic in weight than your grocery runs. My plastic foldable table is probably your annual amount. While it seems wasteful, plastic bags are very minimal compared to other items.

Although I agree that Japan uses lots of plastic everywhere, I can see how the sheer size of stuff in the US can easily offset for that. The average American man weighs 50% more than the average Japanese man (200 lbs vs. 135). The average househould trash container in the US is the size of a garbage truck in Japan (being dramatic with this one, but less than you'd think).

The trash cans I have seen in Japan are roughly the same size as the ones I see in the US. The garbage trucks are smaller (to fit on smaller roads).... but they have a lot more of them!

Go to Costco in Texas and watch the literal pallets of bottled water the people cart into their trucks. They make up for entire Japanese towns probably.

People in the US go through a lot of individually bottled water bought in large quantities--including in many many areas where the tap water is perfectly fine.

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.

People in Japan also drink a lot of bottled water (and other bottles products).

Maybe carbonated drink consumption is the diferentiator? The plastic of those tends to be thicker.

Was skeptical about this data.

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

I still have the mental image of that SINGLE banana wrapped in plastic in a random 7-11 I went to during my trip to Japan a few months ago.

Hard to keep a straight face reading that headline with that image burned in my mind.

Individually shrink-wrapped fruit is also a thing in the US (and in every airport in the world, probably). But I haven't seen these [0] in the US.

[0] https://ibeantravelling.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/6e290558...

I have as Christmas gift items but not sure I ever have for day to day.

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.

It's a cultural perception issue, mainly.

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.

> The trash still ends up in the ocean

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.

Yep lived in Japan 3 years - their use of over-packaging and single use plastics is insane.

That’s not to mention completely tearing down homes and rebuilding them after a couple of decades.

they're just as bad as americans when it comes to excess plastic packaging, but at least they separate their waste

that's it, that's the whole thing... everything else is like the rural theme park imagination of what japan is

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