I know these Japan stories for Americans might be awe-inspiring, but man if there isn't crap loads of waste from all the products they sell here. Yesterday during my grocery shopping each individual glass container product got its own separate paper bag, meat was given a plastic bag even thought it was already wrapped in plastic and my juices got another plastic bag. Even the wines I got were given this plastic wrap, just not to hit each other.<p>I get that compared to the US the recycling here might be better (and yeah, I do need to separate my trash), but this is pure "oh so mysterious and oriental Japan so great" article. What help is recycling for if you're producing insane amounts of unnecessary waste.
One of the things that stood out to me last time I visited Japan was how much packaging everything has, and how few bins there are around. It is cool that there's one community that values not letting things to go waste and the story itself is very cute. But "the Japanese philosophy" regarding waste to me seemed to be: produce a lot of it, and burn it.<p>Europe may not be much better in producing, consuming, recycling or otherwise handling waste (and could easily be worse? I don't know how to measure this) but there's a tendency in "the west" to mysticise Japan and I don't know if it's helpful to do so in general, but particularly in this case.
Also see this town<p><a href="https://www.core77.com/posts/125980/This-Japanese-Town-Sorts-Their-Waste-Into-These-45-Categories#:~:text=In%202003%2C%20the%20Japanese%20municipality,in%20America%2C%20single%20digits" rel="nofollow">https://www.core77.com/posts/125980/This-Japanese-Town-Sorts...</a>.)
See also lots of single-use plastic:<p>* <a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220823-quitting-single-use-plastic-in-japan" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220823-quitting-single-...</a>
This is all very good, but I don't think it is specific to Japan - I'd hazard a guess that most old world cultures have a history of eliminating food waste dating back to the days when existence was much more precarious thanks to war, pestilence and famine. Thinking of Scotland for example, there's haggis (heart, liver, lungs, and originally stomach), black pudding (blood), plus all those "recipes" for leftovers like stovies and rumbledethumps. And in Europe I've seen things on menus like pigs trotters, pigs ears and so on.
Everyone mention single use plastic and too many wraps. For those who don't live there, you may not know about gifting too. Everyone give gifts. I don't have the numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if they give gifts 5-10x the rest of the world. Which are wrapped, boxed, with more wrappings and plastics inside. I think one way to reduce this may be for companies to start making reusable fancy gift boxes and have celebrities in commercials and posters show that it's the new cool thing to do.
Guess Indian is far better than US and Japan when it comes to producing plastic waste. A lot of Indian states have plastic bans, drastically reducing the amount of plastic wasted via packaging or grocery shopping