There are four types of garbage. Red is the easiest. It's burnable. This includes kitchen scraps, dirty plastics (like when buying food and eating on the go) and anything else that doesn't fit in the other categories. The hazardous category is collected in a separate bag on the same day. This garbage is collected twice a week (so nice)!
Green is nonburnable trash. It's things that can't be recycled, or are big. Things likes batteries, old small appliances, broken dishes, or in our case, my garment bag that was dragged along behind Papa P's truck. It's only collected once a month. We just missed putting out for the moth by a week.
The most complicated category is recycling. It's divided five subcategories: glass, plastic bottles, other plastics (including film plastic that is commonly used to wrap new items in the store which I couldn't recycle in the US), metal cans (soda and canned goods), and paper.
Me, trying to figure out today's recycling (Monday), which covers four types of recycling.
I went to take the first bag of plastic bottles and realized it was more than just that today. I hadn't looked super closely at the paper--today is also paper and cans (we don't have any glass bottles). I cheated by looking at how others had sorted it.
I went to the store to buy smaller bags. Our relocation contact had me buy 45 liter bags for recycling and burnable garbage, but they are way too big for our trash sorting cabinet and our amount of plastic bottles and cans.
Bags for trash MUST be bought within the city you are using them in. The cost of the bags pays for the collection.
The Nagoya bags have their owl mascot on them.
This recycling day is done at the park. Other plastics such as wrappers are left in front of the house, once a week, on Wednesdays. For today's recycling, there are signs thar have writing and pictures on them telling you where to sort each kind. I ran into one of my older neighbors here for yhe first time. I spoke with her in my broken, particle-less Japanese abd told her we lived over there, came from America, and that my husband works for Toyota. I am sure I sounded worse than a three year old. I probably sounded like a cave woman, but I tried. She seemed pleased to meet me.
There is one more way to recycle that I forgot! Paper milk cartons and styrofoam meat and food trays are recycled at the grocery store! Milk comes in liter cartons and you rinse and cut open the carton.
Last week when I went on a walk it was burnable garbage day. I took a few pictures because I thought it was interesting. I saw the garbage truck and several guys jumping out to collect the garbage from several houses at a time. I think this was an apartment building or business. They have the cages to keep the birds from getting in the garbage. Not sure why there were blue bags on the right.
Residents in houses or apartments sometimes had nets, also to keep the birds out. Apparently a lot are yellow (but not all) because supposedly the birds can't see them. Our contact called them crows, but the ones I saw were so huge, I think they were ravens. Ravens are smart!
I think I have a basic understanding of the garbage sorting here, although, I think there is always more to learn!
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