The throwaway mentality remains strongly entrenched here -- witness the mountains of refuse in the nation's parks and other favored sites for cherry-blossom viewing as the season reaches its peak. To anyone viewing the discarded cans, bottles and paper and plastic packaging, active recycling may seem like a distant dream, a goal that the Japanese public is far from ready to embrace. And yet April 1 brought the full implementation of the Container and Package Recycling Law that was first introduced in 1997. Now, along with plastic and glass bottles, paper cartons and wrapping materials and plastic containers and packaging are also classified as recyclable.
Much will be required before the law can even partly succeed in relieving Japan's waste-disposal nightmare. Responsibility for collecting the recyclable items separately from other waste falls to local governments, or individual wards in the case of Tokyo, but a recent Health and Welfare Ministry survey discovered that few municipalities are prepared to begin doing so. For example, the ministry anticipated that 803 cities, towns and villages would start separately collecting paper containers for recycling this month, but only 112 will. The expected annual total of 87,000 tons of waste paper to be recycled thus has been slashed to 18,000 tons.
The situation is even worse with plastic containers. Only 493 local governments, instead of the 1,348 envisaged in the original plan, have started collecting such items separately. The law contains a loophole that allows municipalities to determine for themselves if they are ready to embark on separate collections, and many say their reason for postponement is the continuing public confusion about what is recyclable and how waste should be separated. The confusion does exist, but the failure of many local governments to provide adequate guidance is partly to blame.