Recycling and the Art of the Nervous Breakdown

Posted on May 11, 2005

Think that recyling is too much bother? Too busy to sort your trash into two bags? If you lived in Kamikatsu, Japan, you might have some kind of nervous breakdown when faced with their draconian new trash-sorting laws. Two bags are for slackers! In Yokahama, trash must be sorted into 44 different categories. And properly labeled in the correct type of marker -- or else.

When this city recently doubled the number of garbage categories to 10, it handed residents a 27-page booklet on how to sort their trash. Highlights included detailed instructions on 518 items. In Yokohama, trash that escapes recycling is put in transparent bags and loaded into trucks for incineration. Lipstick goes into burnables; lipstick tubes, "after the contents have been used up," into "small metals" or plastics. Take out your tape measure before tossing a kettle: under 12 inches, it goes into small metals, but over that it goes into bulky refuse.
Socks? If only one, it is burnable; a pair goes into used cloth, though only if the socks "are not torn, and the left and right sock match." Throw neckties into used cloth, but only after they have been "washed and dried."
"It was so hard at first," said Sumie Uchiki, 65, whose ward began wrestling with the 10 categories last October as part of an early trial. "We were just not used to it. I even needed to wear my reading glasses to sort out things correctly."
To Americans struggling with sorting trash into a few categories, Japan may provide a foretaste of daily life to come. In a national drive to reduce waste and increase recycling, neighborhoods, office buildings, towns and megalopolises are raising the number of trash categories - sometimes to dizzying heights.
Indeed, Yokohama, with 3.5 million people, appears slack compared with Kamikatsu, a town of 2,200 in the mountains of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands. Not content with the 34 trash categories it defined four years ago as part of a major push to reduce waste, Kamikatsu has gradually raised the number to 44.

So what's happening in Japan? Did someone with OCD get put in charge of the trash collection department? No, apparently they're simply drowning in trash and are literally running out of room to bury or burn it. The growing population in the U.S. has a price: an increasing volume of garbage. Conserving resources? Recyling trash into 44 neatly labeled categories? Trash police to monitor proper garbage disposal? Most people can barely get their taxes done and their water bill paid on time. I sense a bonanza for mental health professionals.