Dave Cahill

One of the first things you notice here is that there are no bins in the streets. You finish an ice cream and wander for hours with the sticky wrapper in your hand, eyes darting, searching for a bin that never appears. Why? Firstly, people don’t often eat in the streets here, but for me, that never explained the total absence of bins. Then I read this brilliant article, and it all made sense.

In Japan, sorting rubbish is big news. The article above does a better job than I ever could of describing it, but suffice to say that my old Irish habits of chucking everything in the one bag just don’t cut it anymore. Here’s a shot of 3 of the sub-categories into which rubbish must be sorted, according to my local rubbish authority:

So I tried to be a good citizen, and keep my burnables far away from my non-burnables, my PET bottles far from my cans, but a while later this letter came through the door of every apartment in my block.

After some fiddling on translation sites and scribbling on the letter, I realised it was something to this effect:

Some miscreant has been placing rubbish bags in the rubbish cage without writing their name on them. If this does not stop, we will be forced to open the bags and sort through the rubbish for personally identifiable material.

Jaysus.

So needless to say, I have been writing my name loud and proud on my bags since. But that wasn’t enough.

Bringing out my neatly labelled rubbish one day, I noticed there were quite a few bags in the rubbish cage. All mine. And all with little yellow notes.

Turns out my decision that plastics should go in the “non-burnable” category was wrong. Plastics, ladies and gentlemen, are burnable, and if you forget that, your rubbish will be left in the cage, covered in illegible yellow notes.

So after a long session rummaging through my last 2 weeks of domestic waste, I was back in compliance.

Then again, my situation is not the worst. I have heard of foreigners who no longer have the right to put their rubbish out for collection at all due to repeated sorting violations, and have to deliver their rubbish direct to the depot and have it checked for sorting errors while they wait.

This is the real reason why there are no bins on the streets here. If there were, do you think people would spend hours sorting their rubbish into several bags by category? Indeed not. Direct to the public bin, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Here’s a quote from the article above:

In Yokohama, after a few neighborhoods started sorting last year, some residents stopped throwing away their trash at home. Garbage bins at parks and convenience stores began filling up mysteriously with unsorted trash.

“So we stopped putting garbage bins in the parks,” said Masaki Fujihira, who oversees the promotion of trash sorting at Yokohama City’s family garbage division.

So there you have it. I’m a full-time rubbish sorter, with a sideline in high school English teaching!