Try not to get rejected by the trash collector

Japan is crowded. Imagine cramming half the population of the United States into California, and you might have a feel for how tight it is here. There's not a lot of space to go around. And there's definitely not a lot of extra space for landfills. If the Japanese were to throw away their trash like we Americans do, they could cover their entire country with trash in one year.

Instead, the Japanese have instituted strict trash segregation and disposal regulations. Mondays and Thursdays, you can trash your burnable waste (food scraps, paper food containers, etc), which gets incinerated. Tuesday you can get rid of your plastic containers and packaging. The 2nd & 4th Wednesday you can dispose of non-burnable waste (toys, ceramics, glass, etc.). Friday you can recycle your cans and PET bottles. And the 2nd and 4th Saturday, you can recycle remaining items (like newspapers, clothes, and kitchenware). I have 5 trash recepticals in my apartment, one for each type of trash. So far, Tuesday's trash is winning by a landslide . I generate 3 times more plastic packaging waste (shopping bags, plastic food trays, potato chip bags, etc.) than all other types of garbage combined. Guess which trash container it goes in?

So lets say you finish a jar of Jiffy peanut butter. To successfully throw it away, you'd have to rinse it out and wash it clean of residual peanut butter, unscrew the plastic cap and put that in Tuesday's trash, tear off the paper label and put that in Saturday's trash, and the put the bottle itself in Friday's trash. The paper label needs to be bundled up with string in a crisscross fashion with other paper waste. The plastic has to be secured in transparent bags so the trash collector can inspect it and verify your trash segregation skills.

So what happens if you mess up? The trash Nazis will stick a bright yellow rejection notice on your trash bag and leave it in the collection area for all of your neighbors to see. You better pick it up and bring it back to your home for resorting if you don't want the neighbors whispering about the incompetent foreigner who didn't know that empty issho-bin sake bottles have to be returned to the liquor store.

So far, I'm 6 for 6 in the trash disposal game. The trash Nazis don't have anything on me! Today I performed my first ever surgical operation on a toothpaste tube. The goo extraction procedure was a bit more sticky than I had expected, but still a complete success. Take that, trash Nazis!