Trashy!

Okay...here's what I like to call my "Ode to Trash"...

Japan is about the size of California and the population of Japan is about half of the population of the United States...take a minute to think about that...Can you get a little picture for how crowded it is here?!?! Yes, half the population of the entire U.S. living in a country the size of California!

So...with that in mind, trash disposal becomes a unique issue for this country to tackle. Here's what they decided to do about it: Everyday we sort our trash into 6 different categories - 5 of those categories contain different kinds of materials that can be recycled. Some of our trash-time activities include cutting off the tops of toothpaste tubes (because the cap and the tube part fall into different trash categories) and rinsing out, cutting apart, drying, and binding stacks of cardboard milk containers. (my least favorite!) We even have trash calendars and books on how to sort and remove trash from our house.

Anyway, the down side of this is obviously the time factor and the fact that every night is "garbage night" since we take out one kind of trash each day. On the upside though, we only have one very small bag of trash every other week that is considered "non-recyclable." So, I guess that the industrious Japanese have come up with a pretty good plan to not have themselves taken over by landfills! (though they do use landfills to add more land mass to their country from time to time!)

Congratulations - you have now completed your lesson in Japanese Trash 101.