Gomi--Japanese Trash is Serious Business

February 9, 2006 (more stuff)

This may bore you, but it fascinated me. The cultural feeling of responsibility for the community and the planet is just so very different from ours! Gomi is Japanese for trash, and the rules concerning household waste are pretty amazing. We were issued a large gomi packet upon signing our lease, containing 120 bright yellow peel-and-stick trash labels, and an instruction booklet (a large instruction booklet!) in English and Japanese detailing what to do. Each family is issued these stickers for free at the beginning of the year--60 stickers per family member.

Basically, trash is divided into combustible trash, non-combustible trash, recyclable items and sodai gomi, or large items. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Wait, it gets better.

First, each resident must buy special transparent gomi bags from certain stores (I'm working on figuring out WHICH stores, and how to ask for them). The bags have specially marked spaces for those self-stick labels--one label for a small bag, two for medium, and three for large (45 liters). If your trash won't fit in the large bag, it's considered oversized, and there's a separate procedure for that. Your combustible and non-combustible trash goes into these special bags, and you must attach the proper number of stickers before walking to the special neighborhood gomi place (ours is a park a block away) and leaving the bags in the designated area. You may not leave the bags out the night before. You must leave them between 5:00 and 8:00am. If you leave them out too early, dogs or cats will tear them apart and strew the trash...and our neighbors will KNOW it's our trash all over the street, especially if it has stuff with English labels!

They won't take trash without the right labels, or in the wrong bags, or in the wrong place. If you run out of labels before the end of the year, you have to PURCHASE more--and the purchased ones are very vivid green or purple, so everyone in the neighborhood knows YOU were a wasteful person and a bad citizen. Combustible trash is picked up twice a week--Wednesday and Saturday (!!) for us. Non-combustible trash (aerosol cans, hair dryers(!) metal caps, etc.) is collected once a month. Kitchen waste, like orange peel, is considered combustible trash, but the government will subsidize your purchase of some sort of machine that I *think* is a compost bin. I have to wait until I can check with Sayuri, my Japanese housing counselor on the base, for a translation. Sometimes, the English version of Japanese instruction manuals makes no sense at all--in this case, the instruction booklet says I can "compound" my trash with the aid of a "special device". I hope that is a composting bin (it looks like one) but perhaps it's just a compactor.

Recyclable trash is picked up twice a month, and can go in any transparent bag...no stickers required. However, it has to be separated into one of 12 (yes, that's twelve, as in a ten and a two) different categories. I won't go into the extreme details, but I'll give a few examples. Drink cartons must be cut open, rinsed, laid flat, and tied into a bundle. Yard waste must be cut into lengths of no more than 80cm, and of a diameter of 10cm or less, and must be tied into 80 x 30cm bundles of no more than 10kg each. You are requested to brush all dirt from fallen leaves before bagging them in transparent bags (I am not making this up!!) You may put out no more than two bundles of sticks or two bags of leaves at a time. Dry cell batteries go in a special pail at the gomi collection point. Even cloth is recycled! And soiled or "dirtied" paper, like pizza boxes, are supposed to go with combustible trash, not recyclables (there's a whole list of specific kinds of paper that should not be recycled.)

Sodai gomi, like an old mattress or a kitchen chair, is picked up by appointment only....and you have to purchase special stickers for those items, ranging from about $5 to about $15 per item. Computers, appliances like refrigerators and air conditioners, concrete blocks, car parts, etc. can only be disposed of by calling the place of purchase and following their directions. The city will not take these items. My list of prices for sodai gomi is pretty exhaustive...it will cost me about $15 to dispose of an electric organ, for example!

It's all pretty bewildering, and we've had several people (including several of my American teachers during the Intercultural Relations class) tell us "Oh, don't worry about all that stuff. Just bring your garbage to the dumpsters on base. We do!" But if our neighbors can all sort their trash properly, so can we. We'll be better stewards of the earth...and our Japanese neighbors will be less likely to see Americans as selfish pigs! Besides, I bet we'll meet some people when making our treks to the gomi station!

I also never realized how much trash one or two people can generate. It's really a revelation, and embarrassing, too! New goal...to produce less waste.