2025. In Europe. They burn. Their trash. On the street.
The bartender was talkingto a local bar owner, and he was explaining how he was trying to find another contractor for garbage disposal because he found the current rate ridiculous. Every contractor hung up on him after hearing his address, and he found out that yakuza had territories around Kabukicho and you'd get in trouble if you took a contract there.
Interesting to hear garbage disposal being a common business organized crime go for. I guess there's many utilities too to have garbage disposal infrastructure for other illegal activities
Instead of the famous Japanese customer service, residential garbage requires you to sort it, put it in transparent bags, put it out on specific days etc. so your neighbors can personally shame you if you do any of it wrong.
Commercial garbage in Tokyo gets left out on the street (like NYC up until this year) and occasionally attracts rats.
The rest of Japan's garbage culture (small bins, poor/mafia organization etc.) is totally self inflicted and is more of a cultural phenomena rather than a technical one.
It's their "service" or no service, with some extremely narrow exceptions, like a very small town named Aci Bonaccorsi, which fought that and now they're able to keep their streets on an amazing level of cleaniness compared to nearby municipalities.
Garbage disposal is the last remaining big business handled by the local mafia (drugs are handled by camorra nowadays) and they're absolutely doing anything to avoid losing that.
And I have never heard anything (or were able to find something on google) about an island full of trash. Islands are simply too valuable for that, and you'd also need to bring the trash there by boat.
Zakynthos is the island I was referring to. It's an illegal dumping ground, and even the EU has fined them for it. Also Kalymnos has a decades-old issue with burning trash - they even call it "trash volcano". Lots of other islands also have illegal dumping issues. Also many nature areas in mainland Greece are not in the most pristine state, often littered with junk, often junk that you can tell has been there for a long time. Whenever I went exploring by car, we would find the most beautiful areas but almost always trash everywhere :( Maybe it's gotten better though, I haven't been back since 2019, though I'm not sure I really want to.
[0] https://www.thenationalherald.com/arsonists-run-amok-in-athe...