I have been a big fan of recycling since moving to Japan and even though things could get a bit inconvenient at times due to only certain types of garbage being picked up on a given day I thought it was still worth it. After all, it is very important to recycle…
Very recently thought something interesting happened. Instead of letting us put our garbage in our own garbage bags, which let us recycle all the extra plastic bags we got from supermarkets and other stores, we are now required to put both burnable and non-burnable garbage in special Mitaka City bags which the city sells at supermarkets. Garbage put out in other types of bags are simply not picked up with this purple “Attention” message pasted on the bag. The “official” garbage bags themselves do have 2 sentences in English (and Chinese, Korean and a few other languages) on them but this purple piece of paper does not.
I wonder if other cities have started doing something similar and what the “official” reason is for using these bags.
3 comments:
I know Taipei, Taiwan uses official garbage bags as well. The reason behind is to charge the garbage processing fee according to the amount of garbage generated. Before this policy, the processing fee was charged according to the residence water usage, which might not be a good indicator.
For the same reason, in Vancouver Canada, we "rent" garbage bins so the processing fee is charged according to the size and number of bins. A 2nd reason is to standardize the bins so the garbage truck now empties them automatically - less chance of hurting the workers and more efficient.
I also realized another reason why they do this - this encourages using your own "Eco Bag" for shopping and avoiding the plastic bags from the stores since you can't use them to put your garbage in anymore.
That's a win in my book...
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