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Japan’s small size and mountainous terrain present challenges for food self-sufficiency. The country imports almost two-thirds of its food and three-quarters of its livestock feed. Yet each year, Japan throws out 28.4 million tonnes of food – much of it edible.
This comes with steep environmental and economic costs. Compared to many countries, consumers in Japan pay higher prices for food because so much of it is imported. And they also pay taxes to cover the majority of the 800bn yen (£4.2bn/$5.4bn) the country spends each year on waste incineration. Food makes up about 40% of the rubbish that Japan incinerates, and incineration produces significant air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
As the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, Japan has set goals of cutting emissions by 46% by 2030 and becoming fully carbon neutral by 2050. Tackling food wastewill have to be a part of those efforts, Takahashi says.
That is neat! But since it charges you to put things in, wouldn’t that encourage people to just throw their food in the trash? Or is that discouraged somehow?
When I lived in Seoul, stores sold different colored bags on behalf of the city for every type of waste disposal. They will only pick up the official bags and they were transparent-ish so it was easy for them to see whether you were breaking the bag type rules.
So, even if these receptacles charge money, I expect it would be cheaper than regular trash.
Interesting! Does the curbside program bill you by weight as well? That sounds labor intensive, compared to here where you just rent the $small, $$medium or $$$large bin and pay quarterly regardless of use. And recycling and composting are free.
curbside trash will only get picked up if it’s in the official bags, which are priced by size(1L, 5L… all the way up to 50L-75L)
OH, I get it. The pick up price is the purchase price. That’s pretty clever. Does that mean the trash collectors have to pick every bag up by hand and glance at the contents? How many categories of trash/bag are there?
Two, basically. Green one is for normal, yellow one is for food waste. Grey one is for recyclable stuff which I’ve never seen for myself which I assume is because there’s almost always a different company that handles them. There are some special bags for something like glass, dirt…etc which I have no personal experience with. But that’s just a bit fancier normal bag so only two it is: normal and food waste bag.
Those kind of machines I’ve showed earlier are very common but only in big apartment complexes, which is, still, one of the most common housing in South Korea. If there’s no such machine near you, you’ll just have to buy bags for food waste.
Trash collectors don’t really take a hard look at the contents but when it’s so obvious that there’s food waste in a normal bag, it’s about $100 fine for you and the garbage won’t get collected.
But in reality, quite a lot of people do throw out food waste in a normal bag, not specifically because food waste bag is significantly more expensive(I’m not sure if it actually is more expensive or not. It’s such an insignificant amount of money for me to track) but because convenience.
If you go shopping in South Korea, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll get plastic bag like this. This works as both shopping bag and normal waste bag. Pretty neat(although they tear easier than any other bags ☹)
That’s really neat, thanks for explaining!