Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnea | Hacker News Reader

After studying Japanese language and culture for the last 15 years, and spending about 6 months there in total, I would say they have a massive over-packaging problem in general.

I've never seen a place throw away more plastics than in Japan.

If the current oil situation forces a reworking of this system, I'd say all in all, that's an upside.

View on HN

Japan can package up all the snacks they want, they still use far less oil per capita than the USA.

Japan: Approximately 28% of all passenger kilometers are traveled by rail

United States: Rail travel accounts for only about 0.25% of passenger kilometers

Remember: when you drive your 30mpg car to work, 20 miles down the freeway, alone in your vehicle by yourself, you are burning over a gallon of refined petroleum product every single day. You can make a loooooot of plastic bags with that much oil.

Something like 95% of Americans get to work via automobile.

Isn't it 2/3 of a gallon plus any cold start inefficiency? But either way your point stands.

20 miles to work = 40 mile round trip.

The average American commute time is something like 20-25 minutes and if that involves highway travel, 20 miles isn’t a crazy assumption.

There’s something to be said for the amount of microplastics that end up in the environment. And also that the comparison isn’t only against the US, there are other countries that lead the way in plastic reduction.

That’s what I’d expect for a country that imports all of its oil and a country that produces more oil than it uses, especially considering the oil importing nation is an island 1/25th the size of the oil rich country, making dense rail transportation easier.

I’d love if the US had better public transport and I could get rid of my car, it costs more per month than my housing (which is admittedly cheap)

I think the US is still a crazy outlier regardless of how much oil they produce.

They use double the oil of the entire EU despite having half the population.

Triple the usage of ASEAN despite having a little less than half the population.

Five times the usage of India despite India having four times the population.

I believe personal transportation is something like half of all oil use globally last I checked.

I don’t even think it’s about getting rid of your car entirely, it’s about a wild amount of dependence and a crazy economic incentive system where a 20mpg work truck has been the most popular vehicle in the country for decades. 100% of trips taken per week needing a car is a big consumption difference than 70% of trips taken per week needing a car.

The actual canned response to this is [1] and humidity. Daily levels of humidity in East/Southeast Asia is whole another level from US/EU(or vice versa).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glico_Morinaga_case

Japan is nowhere near the worst for plastic waste per capita, and it has very high recycling rates.

Rely more on statistics and less on personal observation.

Since very few types of plastic are actually recyclable most of it ends up being burned despite being separately collected, so I don't think you can simply discount the recycled plastic from the plastic waste being produced.

Japan burns about half of its collected plastic via thermal recycling (recovering the energy) and recycles about a third into new products.

The key point is that Japan recycles 85% of its plastic waste, which is excellent compared with a country like the US that recycles about 10%. And, the per capita plastic use in the US is far more than in Japan.

This whole point pops up on the internet so frequently because tourists go to Japan and see lots of individually packaged items in supermarkets and convenience stores. Yes, there is room for improvement there, but overall the situation is not as bad as many countries and probably doesn't deserve the attention it gets.

Burning trash is recycling now?

Yes, if the resulting energy is captured:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste-to-energy

Efficient burning is far better than shipping it off to a dump in some poor country, while claiming that it'll somehow be recycled there.

Even better to provide a source for each statistic.

Japan has about half the plastic waste rate, yes [1].

However, the top recycling search result claims Japan only has a 19% recycling rate compared to the US’s 24% [2], but you might have been referring to a specific recycling type?

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/plastic-waste-per-capita

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_rates_by_country

You're greatly misunderstanding that second link: that's the breakdown of what happens to collected municipal waste within each country (notice they all add up to 100% for each country). That says nothing about total amounts of plastic waste collected or recycled.

See Table 1 here and its sources:

https://circulareconomy.earth/publications/how-japan-is-usin...

Japan recycles about 24% of its used consumer plastics into new products, while the US recycles about 8%. That's NOT factoring in thermal recycling, which Japan is far better at than the US.

Thermal recycling is a classic Japanese euphemism for burning plastics. Yes, for energy, but it's still misleading

https://www.mitsui.com/solution/en/contents/solutions/circul...

>it produces CO2 and toxic substances when it is burned.

Yes, the bin for general waste is even labeled “burnables,” and in my experience that is where non-rigid plastic films go.

(Films are very difficult to sort automatically; we landfill them here in SF.)

Nippon packaging

So dressed like a lover

Frigid winter day

Reply on news.ycombinator.com