About a month ago, William posted about rules related to garbage disposal:
https://www.facebook.com/Kumamotoi/photos/a.129499733790134/2553223608084389/
That led to a discussion in which the following question came up: “Does Japan do their own recycling or do they ship it to China?” I couldn’t find a good answer but responded with a posted about Japan’s surprisingly low recycling rates:
https://www.facebook.com/Kumamotoi/posts/2565431110196972?__tn__=-R
Well, NHK came to the rescue and answered the question about whether Japan does its own recycling or sends it to China. And the answer is that, so far, they’ve been sending it to China but that China is now refusing to accept such garbage. The NHK program explained that in 2017 both the U.S. and Japan were major exporters of recyclable (?) plastics to China: 1,670,000 tons from the U.S. and 1,430,000 tons from Japan. So, the U.S. sent a larger total amount of plastic trash to China but, on a per capita basis, Japan was actually a bigger exporter. Japan is closer to China so that might account for part of the reason that Japan’s per capita rate was higher. Still, whatever the reasons, that’s a lot of plastic trash.
The point of the NHK program was that both the U.S. and Japan are going to have to learn to reduce their production of plastic trash and learn how to recycle it themselves.
Let’s all carry cloth bags to stores so we don’t need plastic ones.
– Kirk
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20190512/k10011913361000.html
