Simple bananas Hard-boiled eggs. Chocolate chip cakes. In retail stores across Japan, all of these pieces have one thing in common: they are sold wrapped in plastic containers.
This has been the case for decades.
Retailers say that if the parts are not packaged in plastic, it is difficult to guarantee the criteria for protecting food in the source chain, according to a spokesperson for Lawson, a national chain of convenience stores.
But Japan’s deep reliance on plastics does not prevent the packaging of exclusive items.
Of the 540 billion plastic bags for purchases used internationally each year, Japanese consumers consume about 30 billion. To put this in context, Japan has twice the UK population, but uses 17 times more plastic bags. The United States kicks them out of the park, about a hundred billion bags each year.
While Japan generates less user-consistent general waste than the most evolving countries, it produces more user-consistent plastic waste than in the rest of the world, with the exception of the United States, according to a 2018 United Nations report.
Japan has been striving for plastic waste since enacting a law in 1991 that establishes a duty to recycle packaging in companies.
But while other countries have been waging a war opposed to single-use plastic for years, Japan has been slow to play.
However, that may be about to change. This month, the Japanese government filed a mandatory payment of 3 to five yen (3 to five cents) for a plastic bag, which corresponds to a movement already made in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Is this a sign that Japan, despite everything, is in a position to assume its love story with plastic?
Japan’s obsession with plastic dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, according to Roy Larke, a professor at Waikato University and editor of the JapanConsuming market news site. At the time, Japan was thought to be the global factory, but while its economy was booming, the country was looking for its symbol as a manufacturer of reasonable products at a high-end retailer.
Manufacturers have paid more attention to packaging to attract consumers for quality, and the criteria have been reinforced through stores that remain convinced that shoppers prefer made packaging.
“Big stores see themselves as quality referees for the customer, so they’ll reject a lower packaging that’s too simple,” Larke says.
The preference for packaging extends to food, both for hygiene and appearance.
In 1993, anthropologist Joy Hendry stated in her e-book “Culture of Wrapping: Courtesy, Presentation in Japan and Other Societies” that the preference for plastic food packaging is an integral part of Japanese visitor service culture or omotenashi.
Cheaper items can appear more upmarket when wrapped in plastic, Hendry writes. It gives the impression that a store is providing a better, more considerate service.
Japan would possibly consume a large amount of plastic, but it also promotes recycling as a noble civic company, according to Jeongsoo Yu, an environmental expert and vice-dean of Tohoku University.
There’s even a mantra for this: reduce, reuse, recycle.
There are designated days to eliminate waste from food, plastics, glass bottles and aluminum cans. Many local government websites involve detailed commands on how other people recycle items. For example, the city of Chiba, near Tokyo, has designated places where others can throw away the caps used to seal polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles. It also provides hotlines for others who need to throw away syringes and computers.
But while Japan’s technique for waste sorting is sophisticated, in reality, the country’s recycling formula is surpassed by the large volume of plastic.
Japan generates about nine million tons of plastic waste each year, just the United States, which generated 35 million tons of plastic waste in 2017 and recycled less than 10%.
The official plastic recycling rate in Japan is 84%, according to the Plastic Waste Management Institute, an organization funded through the brands of polyvinyl chloride Shin-Etsu Chemical, Japan’s largest chemical company.
It seems excellent, and it is, but there’s a warning about that number, says Chisato Jono, a spokesman for Greenpeace in Japan.
When other people classify their plastic waste and throw it away, they assume it’s becoming a new plastic product, Jono says.
However, much of the plastic placed in the containers is switched to a new product because it is of too poor quality and there are too many. Some go to landfill, however, most, 56%, are cremated to produce energy, according to a 2018 report through the Plastic Waste Management Institute. The process, called “thermal recycling”, produces electrical energy but also produces environmentally destructive carbon dioxide emissions, Jono explains.
A small portion of Japan’s overall plastic waste is sent overseas to be processed. In 2018, Japan was the world’s largest exporter of plastic waste and scrap, sending over one million tons abroad compared to nearly 900,000 tons sent by the US.
However, this creates some other problem. Jono says that once Japan’s plastic waste passes through some other territory, they are very unlikely to know how other countries handle it. “We don’t know if (plastic) is well recycled in a way that doesn’t harm people’s health,” she says.
But with China banning imports of plastic waste in August 2017, plastic waste is accumulating in Japan, and many garage services reach saturation levels, for Yu.
For example, in 2017, Japan exported about 75,000 plastic waste to China. That figure fell to 45971 in 2018, following the Beijing ban, and Japan redirected exports of plastic waste to Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand, according to a spokesman for the Plastic Waste Management Institute.
These countries are running to import plastic waste, but do not yet have a general ban.
Yu, the environmental expert, says the Japanese think they’ve finished their component by washing their plastic boxes and conscientiously sorting their trash. But in reality, the challenge of plastic waste will continue to grow unless others replace their behavior by refusing, for example, to buy plastic-packed products.
“This would inspire stores to reconsider their packaging,” Yu says.
At the local level, some stalls in Japan have taken steps to use plastics.
The population of Kamikatsu in southern Japan, a city of 1,490 people, has been pursuing a zero-waste policy since 2003. The program aims to prioritize waste prevention by educating consumers to invest in reusable family items.
Kamikatsu is about to achieve his goal. The municipality recycled about 80.7% of the 301 tonnes of family waste it produced in 2019, according to the city council, well above the national average of 20%, according to OECD data.
Waste, which adds plastic, paper, food scraps and glass, is divided into forty-five categories, which can be collected, exchanged or recycled.
Residents are also encouraged to use single-use products through a program that rewards troubled consumers when they reject disposable plastic parts as plastic bags, says Midori Suga, spokesman for Kamikatsu’s board. These problems can accumulate and be used to purchase other reusable parts, he said.
All remaining waste to be recycled, such as silk paper, is currently incinerated.
Big cities are also looking to reduce waste. In 2018, the city of Kameoka, Kyoto Prefecture, was the first Japanese city to announce plans to ban single-use plastics with a view to ending their use until 2030, according to a city council spokesman. Starting next January, city stores will be prohibited from providing plastic bags to their customers, whether they are loose or not.
While the national plastic bag payment rule marks a major step in reducing Japan’s reliance on plastics, Larke warned that the rate may be too weak to deter repeat offenders.
“If someone has too much to carry, especially in a convenience store, they can buy a bag. But if the payment is 10 yen (9 cents) or more, that would be another story,” he said.
However, Larke added that Japanese consumers are really committed to recycling and that suppliers can oppose visitors’ expectations of plastic packaging if they incorporate this into their commercialization.
Yu says it’s more than ever to move from a “disposable society to an environment-friendly society.” Following trends in much of the world to come, more and more Japanese are choosing to use reusable bottles and bags.
But other people want to realize how much their attitudes can replace business models, Jono says.
“Some corporations in Japan fear that buyers will complain if they don’t put the pieces back in plastic bags, but if consumers say they don’t want them, corporations will also be more susceptible to change,” Jono says.
Attitudes are slowly changing. In 2018, Japan caused a stir by joining the US in refusing to sign the G7 Pact to reduce their use of single-use plastics and prevent plastic pollution.
At the time, Japan’s Environment Minister Masaharu Nakagawa said Japan shared the same enthusiasm for cutting plastic waste that the G7 pact sought, but made the decision not to participate because it could have an effect on daily life and industry. .
However, the following year, Japan pledged to reduce disposable plastic waste by 25% through 2030, and to reuse or recycle 60% of all plastic packaging and boxes during the same year.
Companies are doing their part.
For example, in 2019, 7-Eleven Holdings announced that it would replace the plastic containers around its rice balls with a plant-based alternative. This is vital because the convenience store produces about 2.2 billion rice balls consistent with the year and estimates that it can only save 260 tons of plastic and reduce CO2 emissions through 403 tons consistent with the year.
Jono argues that the solution is not to create biodegradable plastics of choice, but to think of tactics to absolutely eliminate the use of plastics. She cites examples of supermarkets promoting rice and beans in vending machines, allowing others to bring their own boxes and how much they need to buy. It also suggests taking inspiration from the past, when the Japanese packed vegetables in newspapers and used baskets and furoshiki (a special cloth) to send objects.
“My family used to bring a cooking pan to the tofu shop to carry the tofu home. We need to look back on that.”
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