At the end of the 90s, the thousand or so residents of Kamikatsu (a small town in the Japanese prefecture of Tokushima) became a question that would change them forever: “Why do we generate so much waste?”
The response led them to be the first Japanese municipality to declare themselves ‘zero waste’, to sell garbage cans and to ask their neighbors to separate their waste into 45 different categories. Waste that they carry themselves to the local clean point.
One sees this and can only ask one question: have these Japanese gone crazy? And the answer is neither “yes” nor “no”: it is both at the same time.
Why are we talking about this? As often happens lately, everything starts with a video. A tiktoker who resides in Japan (@nuriape_) has shown how what apparently is “jack, knight and king” works: the garbage system.
And the truth is that it is curious: each building has its own waste area. The one in the video is quite broad and, as he explains, super strict. In addition, much of the processing is done by neighbors: things like cleaning the bottles and depositing them in places other than the caps or leaving the cardboard perfectly folded are part of the process. The collection, it seems, is daily.
Now that the new waste rates have returned to waste management to the public debate in our country, the question is… is the Japanese system, in addition to being striking, effective?
How does the Japanese waste system work? Since ’97, Japanese laws require separating glass, PET and cardboard. However, over time, the situation has become more and more complex. And, today, the collection categories range from nine in the “less advanced” municipalities to 45 in many areas of the country.
And no, it is not optional: if you do not separate the garbage correctly, it will not be collected and that’s it.
A garbage collection machine. As a result of these almost three decades of social pedagogy, the country of the rising sun is a well-oiled machine in terms of citizen separation and collection logistics. The problem is, well, it doesn’t help much either.
Because collecting is not recycling. And Japan is the best example: its actual recycling rate is surprisingly low. While Spain (with an infinitely less obsessive system) recycles around 39%, Japan is around 20%.
It is not that in our country we are here to “shoot rockets”: According to EU plans, we should be around 55% since last year. However, there is something we are doing better than Japan just as there are things we are doing worse.
No overflowing containers. That’s perhaps what works best in Japan. Faced with the unequal Spanish management (because they depend on municipalities and councils), the Japanese system prioritizes segmented daily collection, precise calendars and logistical inflexibility.
In addition, they also incorporate things that work in the rest of Europe and Spanish legislation contemplates, but almost no one implements: payment per garbage bag. Something that encourages waste reduction and inherently improves the system’s capacity.
On the other hand, Spain does interesting things (whether they work better or worse): the main thing perhaps is that the system extends responsibility to producers.
What we have in common. While Japan has a hyperdependence on incineration (75% of its garbage ends up burned), Spain has a hyperdependence on landfills (50% ends up buried), we both share a problem with single-use plastics. It is true that Japan is much more worrying (it is the world’s second largest producer of plastic packaging waste per capita), but we both have to think about the matter.
Image | Jonas Gerlach
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