"Rubbish Disposal" is the title of a four page booklet we received from Seki City Hall - it is an english guide for the disposal of - well - rubbish.
For the last three months we have delivered our rubbish on a weekly basis to school - and Yuka drags it across the way to the cake shop and I don't know where it goes from there.
We decided it was time to be grown up and dispose of our own rubbish. One might think this would be an easy task - to figure out when garbage day is all one need do is to keep an eye out for neighbours walking their garbage down the driveway or an ear out for the garbage trucks.
If one has a 9-5 job one could spy on the neighbours and may figure out when garbage day is but one would still have a lot of questions.
On our block alone there are atleast 5 pick-up points. One is obviously for plastic bottles, aluminum cans and syrofoam trays. One is possibly for cardboard and one maybe for leaves and one maybe for magazines.
Japan implemented a recycling program a year ago. Regular household garbage is in the Burnable Rubbish category. Cans that have been cleaned and dryed may go into the designated crate. Bottles have a few crates and are seperated by color. Milk Packs must be cleaned, dried, folded and tied together by stirng and placed in their designated crates. Magazines, Newspaper and Cardboard must be tied together by strin and have their own crate.
We spent some time with Yuka at City Hall last month - we had to register and pick up our garbage bags. We are allowed 100 bags per year at a cost of 4.5 Yen (close to 45 cents) per bag. If you use up your yearly allowance of rubbish bags you must purchase excess at 300 Yen a bag.
When we left City Hall that day we still weren't sure where to dispose of our rubbish or what day we had to deliver it to its place of pick up. Yuka called City Hall and wasn't able to find out so on Wednesday night she knocked on our neighbours door and had our questions answered - kinda sorta -
Thursday and Monday our garbage is picked up half a block away - but check this out - you may not put your garbage our the night before and it must be out by 8 am for pick up.
Apparently the neighbourhood is a "team" and is responsible for its team members garbage - if you aren't following the rules your garbage is returned to you and you must sort it our - the bags are see through.
Two teacher cleaned out their apartment - the previous tenants had left a nasty mess - they but their bags out with everybody elses - Im not sure what happened but the head office was called and the garbage was returned for sorting - crazy
We were very careful as this was our first time - I rolled out of bed at 7:45 Thursday morning - put on a toque and a sweater and headed out -
Posted by Jolayne at January 12, 2003 06:55 PM