Hacker News Reader

> I spend about an hour sorting trash each week

That gets to the clear difference between Japanese culture and US culture.

Americans will sort their trash, but they won't spend that much time sorting their trash.

Japanese culture has an immense amount of civic pride and responsibility that isn't present in the US.

>Collection happens at central points shared by a few houses. So if you fuck it up, your neighbors will know.

>Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind.

Part of it is the fact that neighbors police each other. Culturally we tend to reject when others are intruding in our business. Note the disdain for HOA and busybodies.

Having that culture might be a good thing in respect to recycling but it is also a brake to other societal change as it is a consecutive force.

But one of the beautiful things of living here is to witness (positiv) societal change happening in crazy speed.

It used to be that people smoked everywhere, 10 years ago certain districts started prohibiting smoking in the street and relegated smokers to certain corners, today this corners have been replaced by closed containers with air conditioning and filtration systems.

It sometimes feels magical…

Putting that kind of pressure into cleaning up smoking is pretty cool.

Putting so many hours into recycling... well it depends on how much that actually accomplishes. Because that is a huge amount of labor.

We use translucent plastic bags for trash as well, not that tall bin with lids. So a bag full of sausage bags in the bottles day at the neighborhood collection point sticks out.

I’m just laughing to myself considering the thought of getting Americans to cut open milk cartons, flatten them, and tie them up with string. It will never ever happen. I don’t know why. They think they are too busy or they are too messy. Why? I don’t know. It’s a very complicated long question and I don’t know the answer. Not all cons, maybe the American economy leads the world because the people here left their home countries because they are gamblers and they aren’t the type to tie milk cartons with a string, as much as I would want them to.

Agreed. In the beginning it’s a bit strange, but by now it’s a cherished Saturday morning ritual. I also police the family if they don’t cut them up nicely.

In America about 2/3 of your neighbors would not put in that sort of recycling effort. About 1/3 of your neighbors believe there are no benefits, only downsides to recycling. Maybe 5% just throw pizza boxes and dirty diapers into the recycling stream ruining the paper materials in that truck load. Maybe 2% of them just drop trash on the ground wherever they stand as long as it's not their own home. For the remaining altruists to recycle, they need to live in an area that collects recycling, doesn't quietly dump it in a landfill or ship it to China.

And we burn most of it anyways. It's not like Japan got plastics and glass recycling to work, some of us hoped around the turn of the century that with the rapid progress of technologies at the time we soon will and did the legal prepwork. At the end of the day it was a bit of a dedicated self driving lane.

Is that so? Do you have any sources for that? Honestly curious.

There won't be readily available and easily digestible English sources for these topics but... ~20% of total wastes are recycled[0], of which:

  - 86% of plastics are "recycled", of which 56% is "thermally recycled", the rest 25% is only quoted as "chemical recycling and material recycling combined" in most PR materials, which I think is enough indication that it's not going back into bottles.[1][2]  
  - I was wrong about glasses: 70% of glass bottle source materials comes from recycled materials[3], and use of reusable bottles have declined over the years and converging into 50%[4](by numbers of bottles?).  
 - Papers and milk cartons[5] are fine as had always been; I think those were recycled to toilet papers.

... but the bottom line is 76% incinerated, 1% buried[0], rest recycled of which major part is by "thermal" means. So most of it is burned. Personally I think there won't be rapid drastic changes in this front and it's possibly more worthwhile to find green sources of plastics such as grain straws and fruit skins(but I think I did see a lot of such presumably failed attempts at it in the past couple decades)

0: https://www-cycle.nies.go.jp/magazine/kenkyu/202008.html

1: https://www.sustainability-hub.jp/column/learn/about-chemica...

2: https://www.wbsj.org/activity/conservation/law/plastic-pollu...

3: https://www.glass-3r.jp/data/

4: https://kyushu.env.go.jp/content/900177400.jpg

5: https://www.jpa.gr.jp/states/used-paper/

This is amazing!

Here in Germany, the only additional breakdown is that "glass" is separated into brown glass, green glass, and white (or clear) glass. Usually thought as beer / wine / other.

> Collection happens at central points shared by a few houses. So if you fuck it up, your neighbors will know.

> Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind.

See, that's the key. In my area, we have compost, recycling and trash bins for each home. What you put in it is up to your moral compass. Nobody is checking or seeing what you put in there. If there was some peer pressure around that, things would change rather quickly, I'd imagine. Though I can't see such a system emerging in the states. People like to do their own thing, individually, and not be bothered with it.

Yes. It’s a delicate net of social control. I really wish social scientists would study this more. Can’t be genetic after all.

> Nobody is checking or seeing what you put in there

The trash men check our bins in Seattle (although not very thoroughly). We can be fined for throwing compostable material in the trash (has never happened to me) and your recycling can be rejected for throwing away non-recyclables (has happened to me when someone dumped their trash in my recycling bin.)