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Japan gets creative with trash disposal
By Normitisu Onishi
Yokohama: When this city recently doubled the number of garbage categories to
10, it handed residents a 27-page booklet on how to sort their trash. Highlights
included detailed instructions on 518 items.
Kamikatsu, Japan, has 44 categories of trash, and Masaharu Tokimoto, 76, is
sometimes baffled by them. But he is still a diligent recycler.
In Yokohama, trash that escapes recycling is put in transparent bags and loaded
into trucks for incineration.
Lipstick goes into burnables; lipstick tubes, “after the contents have been
used up,’’ into “small metals’’ or plastics. Take out your tape
measure before tossing a kettle: under 12 inches, it goes into small metals, but
over that it goes into bulky refuse. Socks? If only one, it is burnable; a pair
goes into used cloth, though only if the socks “are not torn, and the left and
right sock match.’’ Throw neckties into used cloth, but only after they have
been “washed and dried’’.
“It was so hard at first,’’ said Sumie Uchiki, 65, whose ward began
wrestling with the 10 categories last October as part of an early trial. “We
were just not used to it. I even needed to wear my reading glasses to sort out
things correctly.’’
To Americans struggling with sorting trash into a few categories, Japan may
provide a foretaste of daily life to come. In a national drive to reduce waste
and increase recycling, neighborhoods, office buildings, towns and megalopolises
are raising the number of trash categories—someP i valla times to dizzying
heights.
Indeed, Yokohama, with 3.5 million people, appears slack compared with Kamikatsu,
a town of 2,200 in the mountains of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main
islands. Not content with the 34 trash categories it defined four years ago as
part of a major push to reduce waste, Kamikatsu has gradually raised the number
to 44.
In Japan, the long-term push to sort and recycle aims to reduce the amount of
garbage that ends up in incinerators. In land-scarce Japan, up to 80% of garbage
is incinerated, while a similar percentage ends up in landfills in the United
States.
The environmentally friendlier process of sorting and recycling may be more
expensive than dumping, experts say, but it is comparable in cost to
incineration.
“Sorting trash is not necessarily more expensive than incineration,’’ said
Hideki Kidohshi, a garbage researcher at the Center for the Strategy of
Emergence at the Japan Research Institute. NYT News Service
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