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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the things that stood out to me last time I visited Japan was how much packaging everything has, and how few bins there are around. It is cool that there's one community that values not letting things to go waste and the story itself is very cute. But "the Japanese philosophy" regarding waste to me seemed to be: produce a lot of it, and burn it.
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.
They actually started installing public trash bins in Osaka recently, the pedal-operated kind. See Rion Ishida's video here: https://youtu.be/Bg2OQT-g0JA?t=2129
In Dwarf Fortress it's essential to get a repeating work order for shell crafts set up early to prevent shells taking up all the stockpile space, and give you some extra cash when the trading caravan rolls around.
Yeah. It’s a dichotomy. On the one hand there is more full use of foodstuffs but single use plastic is a big waste as well as housing where they prefer to demo houses and buildings rather than renovate them. Building lifespan in Japan is btwn 30 and 40 years.
> […] as well as housing where they prefer to demo houses and buildings rather than renovate them.
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).
This is all very good, but I don't think it is specific to Japan - I'd hazard a guess that most old world cultures have a history of eliminating food waste dating back to the days when existence was much more precarious thanks to war, pestilence and famine. Thinking of Scotland for example, there's haggis (heart, liver, lungs, and originally stomach), black pudding (blood), plus all those "recipes" for leftovers like stovies and rumbledethumps. And in Europe I've seen things on menus like pigs trotters, pigs ears and so on.
Everyone mention single use plastic and too many wraps. For those who don't live there, you may not know about gifting too. Everyone give gifts. I don't have the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if they give gifts 5-10x the rest of the world. Which are wrapped, boxed, with more wrappings and plastics inside. I think one way to reduce this may be for companies to start making reusable fancy gift boxes and have celebrities in commercials and posters show that it's the new cool thing to do.
Guess Indian is far better than US and Japan when it comes to producing plastic waste. A lot of Indian states have plastic bans, drastically reducing the amount of plastic wasted via packaging or grocery shopping
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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.
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
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
IMO plastic is not that bad if it gets recycled or used as fuel source in power plants instead of becoming landfill.
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...
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.
that's it, that's the whole thing... everything else is like the rural theme park imagination of what japan is
Dead Comment
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).