How do you get rid of your rubbish?
At home we sort our rubbish into the recyclables (go into a yellow sack for collection every other week), paper (into a green bin, collected every two weeks) and the rest (grey bin, every two weeks). We also store our used batteries to drop off at the local supermarket, glass goes into the bottle bank at the end of our road (sorted by colour – clear, brown and green) where there is also a metal container for bottle tops or other small metal items, and nasty remains of chemicals such as paint and thinners get taken to the local dump for proper disposal.
The Japanese have raised home-based rubbish sorting to a new level however, as the New York Times reports:
YOKOHAMA, Japan – When this city recently doubled the number of garbage categories to 10, it handed residents a 27-page booklet on how to sort their trash. Highlights included detailed instructions on 518 items.Not surprisingly, some can’t cope with these instructions:
Lipstick goes into burnables; lipstick tubes, “after the contents have been used up,” into “small metals” or plastics. Take out your tape measure before tossing a kettle: under 12 inches, it goes into small metals, but over that it goes into bulky refuse.
Socks? If only one, it is burnable; a pair goes into used cloth, though only if the socks “are not torn, and the left and right sock match.” Throw neckties into used cloth, but only after they have been “washed and dried.”...
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.The article doesn’t say whether the incidence of littering has gone up since the park bins were removed…
“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.