Garbage

So I’ve been in the town of Shimizu for about 2 weeks and feel pretty settled in for the most part. One factor of my day-to-day living in Japan, which I am still trying to understand, is the complexities around garbage. Japan has what must be the most complex garbage system known to mankind. To start off, Japan requires that you divide your garbage according to the make of it. I guess we should be used to that: paper, plastic etc. But Japan takes it one step further, paper and plastic is taken every Thursday, then you have your plastic bottles, which are put into one bag with the label and cap in two separate bags. Milk and juice cartons must be washed, cut so all 6 sides are laying flat and dried, before being tied up in a bundle and thrown away every other Wednesday. Then you have your food scraps, which are thrown away on Tuesday and Friday, yet must be thrown away in the designated red bags, not the blue bags; blue is for broken appliances, which can be bought at your nearest 7-elevin in two different sizes. Don’t mix the two colours up! That’s the easy part. Now if you have oversized garbage such as a broken air-conditioner, TV, refrigerator, or washing machine, you’re screwed!!! For the oversized garbage, there are set days when you can do this. In some towns, you have to pay a set price to buy a designated ticket to put on the oversized garbage. Some of these larger items have to be taken back to the retail store you bought it from and they will take it, but you have to pay them a recycling and handling fee. Wow, if that doesn’t sound overwhelming for someone who doesn’t speak very much Japanese, a language of 3 alphabets totalling over 30,000 different characters, I don’t know what is. So the next time you throw something out, think about how fortunate you are for not having to think about it… (did that make sense?)