Recycling in Japan

August 17th, 2008 Alex

image taken from http://janeyvox.blogspot.com/

My friend Danny was back in town from Japan and was telling me how the Japanese have a pretty interesting recycling system. They separate burnable items which can include food and paper that get incinerated and non-burnables, which go to the landfill. Glass bottles, jars, and aluminum/tin cans are separated out and different kinds of paper and cardboard are also separated. Cardboards need to be cut up and bound together into a stack and plastic bottles need to have the labels and caps removed. This all sounds like a lot of work but it sounds like it is a good environmental system. Being in an apartment, my friend Danny has to bring his garbage downstairs and sort it all out. 

In my building complex in South San Francisco, we just have two big blue recycling containers and we are suppose to just toss all our paper/cardboard and plastic/glass/tin containers into it. I assume they bring it all somewhere and it gets sorted? So I guess it works the same way here but other people do it for us. The only problem is that there are different recycling systems for different cities and districts and they are not all consistent. So we never really know what happens with our recycling. For example, San Francisco and Albany are two cities that I know have composting recycling but many other cities in the bay area do not.

Entry Filed under: Recycling