Trash

When I was a kid, dealing with trash was easy.  You put it in the trash can.  When the can was full, you took the bag to the burn barrel and burned it.  End of story.

Pretty soon we started recycling and sent our trash to the dump.  Oh man, I have to sort my trash now!?  What is this?

American garbage collection has nothing on Japan.  Here there are systems for dealing with trash.  That's right, i said systems.  Plural.  More than one.  Never, in all of my life, have I spent so much time dealing with trash.

First off, there are several types of trash: burnable, non-burnable, recyclable, burnable recyclable, and non-burnable non-recyclable.  Paper and food scraps: burnable.  Old bicycle tubes and dark plastics: non-burnable.  Aluminum cans, steel cans, tin cans, and plastic bottles: recyclable.  Thin clear plastics: burnable or recyclable.  Non-burnable non-recyclables are things like old appliances, furniture, bedding and so on.

Let's take care of the burnable stuff first.  For starters, you have to buy special trash bags.  Each town has it's own bags.  There is even a line for you to write your name on your bag.  The community club (like the neighborhood watch) is in charge of policing the trash.  Okay, so you bought your bags with red writing for burnable and your blue bags for non-burnables while you were at the grocery store.   After throwing a dinner party you have filled up a bag with burnable gunk.  You tie up the bag, carry it to the front door and..... set it in the genkan.  Burnable trash is collected on Monday and Thursday mornings before 9:00am.  If you don't get your trash to the designated drop-off site before they shut it down, you get to hold onto that garbage.

What happens if Monday or Thursday is a holiday?  They must not collect, right?  Wrong.  If Thursday is a holiday, they won't collect.  Usually they do collect on Monday even if it is a holiday.  Why?  The best guess I've heard is because it is a courtesy.  They figure if Monday is a holiday you probably partied all weekend and made a lot of trash.  It's as good a theory as any I guess.

Now, all your white, unlabeled Styrofoam, cans, cardboard and other recyclables are piled up at home.  When do they collect those?  They don't.  You have to drop them off at the recycling center.  The only time the recycling center is open that we have free time is Sunday before 10:00am.  And it is polite to wash all your recyclables so they won't stink.  In Japan, polite isn't an option like it is in the States.  You don't buck social convention here.  The Japanese are nothing if not polite.  So, every so often on Sunday we graciously drop off our clean trash and bow to the people supervising the recycling center.

Last there are the non-burnables.  What do you do with those.  That's a great question.  I'm still not sure.  You can't drop them on Mondays or Thursdays.  You can't drop them at the recycling center.  Someone told us that they changed the schedule around but there should be scheduled pick-up days.  We might have found the schedule posted at a trash collection spot in a nearby neighbor hood, but we're not sure because the schedule was written in Japanese.  If it was a schedule, then non-burnables are collected every third Thursday.

So, that is a quick summary of the trash collecting systems.  It only took me six weeks to get comfortable with it.