Victory over waste

by Tom Hughes in At home on 18.08.08

Every time you grumble about having to sift through your rubbish to separate out the recyclable from the irredeemable, spare a thought for the residents of Kamikatsu in Japan.

This is a small community with big ideas on waste - to such an extent that the local council has eradicated it altogether. Instead of collections of rubbish and recycling, residents must compost their own kitchen scraps and then take anything left over to the Zero Waste Centre.

But they can’t just dump it when they get there. Oh no.

The very name of the place, with its unambiguous Japanese precision, tells you all you need to know.

Rather than making a half-hearted attempt to split up a couple of cans and a pizza box, Kamikatsu residents must sort their recycling into a merciless 34 different compartments.

Even by Japanese standards, this is somewhat thorough.

When I lived in Japan five years ago I can certainly remember being slightly confused - and, yes, selfishly resentful - at the level of recycling expected of the common man. There was a bag for general plastics and a bag for PET bottles (never cross the streams); a bag for cans and a paper bag for combustible waste.

The only things which were literally ‘thrown away’ were contained in another separate plastic bag, totally transparent, which had to be bought from supermarkets. A good idea, because it made you think twice about how much you were discarding, as you were literally paying for the privilege.

But for it to work the Japanese system assumed an unimpeachable level of honesty. If it ever occurred to them to hide foreign bodies in amongst the potato peelings, simple civic pride would probably have prevented them from doing so. I must confess, when the options were walking to the all-night 7-11 to buy more bags, or using a little subterfuge to hide some difficult-to-categorise item in with the ‘burnables’, it was a simple choice for my cynical Western mind to make. Especially when you had to walk it to communal collection points.

It wasn’t uncommon to find your bag still there the next day, keeping a solitary vigil, having been left behind for not fulfilling an indefinable, untranslatable collection criterion. The recycling advice leaflets had happy pictures of cartoon animals doing their community-minded duty, but the gloves were off come collection time.

Not my bag

So, would this work here?

Though we’re moving in the right direction, there are always the cynics who refuse to play the game, quoting ’someone they know down the council who says it all goes into landfill/gets exported and dumped anyway’.

Though in time the world will probably be forced to crawl towards the example set by Kamikatsu, in the UK we are still some way behind the (relatively tame) recycling targets set by our Government.

One way of reading the Japanese characters which make up the name Kamikatsu is ‘the higher place of victory’.

It is something we can aspire to.

IMAGE by Flickr user clurr