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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
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still have the mental image of that SINGLE banana wrapped in plastic in a random 7-11 I went to during my trip to Japan a few months ago. Hard to keep a straight face reading that headline with that image burned in my mind.
Individually shrink-wrapped fruit is also a thing in the US (and in every airport in the world, probably). But I haven't seen these [0] in the US. [0] https://ibeantravelling.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/6e290558...
There's also a huge amount of plastic kitsch in Japan.
We probably are seeing more plastic-wrapped fruits and vegetables in the US. Part of it is probably there a certain amount of pressure to make everything barcoded for quicker checkout--especially at self-checkouts.
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. Europe may not be much better in producing, consuming, recycling…
> how few bins there are around Rubbish bins were common in railway stations and other public places until the sarin terrorist attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995, after which most were removed for security reasons. Trashcans are a bit more common now than they were in the first few years after those attacks, but they can indeed still be hard to find. Just a couple of days ago, I was surprised to spot a garbage can o…
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,…
In the west, when we see plastic, we think of litter. And we should, because there's way too many coffee cups, cigarette butts, and fast food wrappers lying on the ground in our towns and cities.
But in Japan people don't litter. So when they see plastic, it's associated with clean new products. The trash still ends up in the ocean, but they don't see it happen - out of sight out of mind.
The amount of overpackaging in that country is absolutely insane. But counterintuitively, they're going to have a hard time getting rid of it. Here, there's a decent amount of public consent for paper straws, biodegradable packaging materials, etc, thanks to the cultural guilt we have because we're surrounded by litter. Over there, people "do their part" by simply not littering - but that's not good enough.
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Maybe we have more industrial plastic waste than Japan? My experiences in Japan are that they use many times more plastic packaging on products than we jse in the US. I find this data extremely hard to believe.
Go to Costco in Texas and watch the literal pallets of bottled water the people cart into their trucks. They make up for entire Japanese towns probably.
On the other hand there are vending machines for various drinks (not all in plastic admittedly) on almost every other Japanese street corner. So I'm not sure how it averages out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> how few bins there are around Rubbish bins were common in railway stations and other public places until the sarin terrorist attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995, after which most were removed for security reasons. Trashcans are a bit more common now than they were in the first few years after those attacks, but they can indeed still be hard to find. Just a couple of days ago, I was surprised to spot a garbage can o…
I think the lack of bins in UK stations is for a similar reason (IRA bombings during the Troubles).
See also lots of single-use plastic: * https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220823-quitting-single-...
Yeah. It’s a dichotomy. On the one hand there is more full use of foodstuffs but single use plastic is a big waste as well as housing where they prefer to demo houses and buildings rather than renovate them. Building lifespan in Japan is btwn 30 and 40 years.
In past decades earthquake building codes evolved a lot, and who would want to live a structure that probably had 'less resilient' capabilities (assuming an insurance company would even give you coverage for older construction).
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,…
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,…
I’ve lived in Japan too and agree that they have a lot of plastic packaging on products. But from what I can tell they still produce far less plastic waste per capita than Americans (about half, before disposal/recycling/incineration): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/plastic-waste-per-capita
Our World In Data sites a 2015 study [1] which in turn cites an 2012 World Bank report [2] for some of its data, including the numbers for Japan. This then in turn cites OECD data without a solid link, but a search and some digging leads us to [3]. This data is acquired through questionnaire (there's some info available in the data explorer), so the trail runs cold there.
I did cross-check with the numbers of the Central Bureau of Statistics of the Netherlands, and the overall waste production matches: an average 532 kg of waste per capita, ~17 million people leads to about 9000 million tons of waste per year.
However, I cannot find the fraction of plastic waste on the OECD site anywhere. If I use the Dutch CBS data (counting "Kunststof verpakkingen", "PMD-fractie", and "Harde plastics"), the Dutch fraction of municipal waste that is plastic-related seems to be only about 4%, which is 5 times fewer than the World Bank report lists.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1260352
[2] https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/1a4...
[3] https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?fs[0]=Topic%2C1%7CEnviron...
[4] https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/83452NED?dl=41FD6