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Japan over packages the crap out things--generally quite beautifully--but they can almost be forgiven for that sin given how anal they are about recycling. 🤠
You bringing us to places like this where access is usually restricted to the public, while also detailing their history, makes the inner kid in me happy; it's like an educational series I used to watch on TV ☺️
@@eadricng3267 Unscheduled visits may be disruptive, so in some areas (like mine), the local government opens up the recycling plant for scheduled tours twice a year and one of the times is during the annual sustainability festival.
I'm an environmental engineer for the US federal government. I visited Japan and noticed the amount of plastic they used and thought there would be issues in the near future until I saw how they managed their waste and separated all of their waste streams. The fact that the community washes, organizes, and separates their waste before dropping it off at a recycling facility makes them way ahead of the curve. Here in the US, we have issues with Single stream recycling because everything just goes in the blue bin and people "wishcycle" hoping that whatever they throw in the bin does get recycled, not knowing that it can cause problems. If only the US and other developed countries were up to Japanese standards, we could do so much better for the environment. Thanks for sharing!
The plastic industry also created RIC's that make products look recyclable when they actually aren't, and they purposely did this so consumers believe that most plastic is recyclable and they are being environmentally conscious.
I think I heard before that plastic can't be infinitely recycled in comparison to metal for example. Can you confirm that as someone familiar with the topic?
@@themonox5881 Studying environmental engineering in Germany with the main focus towards waste managment and landfills. After getting recycled the quality of the plastic drops heavily, as the materials polymere chains get shorter. So yeaaahh it's not possible to recycle plastic infinitely and a few products such as plastic bags can't even get recycled. Almost every manufacturer mixes the recycled plastic with virgin materials which boost the quality of their products. The plastic can be recycled a few times, but at some point the quality is so bad that you "can" only downcycle it into fabric, which on the other hand gets landfilled at the end of its lifespan. I don't know how it's in the US, but we in germany by law can't landfill non pretreated waste, so we mainly treat it by burning it and producing energy, as well as reducing its volume before it gets landfilled.
@@dariganarti343 Hello fellow German, yeah, I think that's what the lecturer told us in material science, just wasn't sure and couldn't find much on the topic. I think he also said that paper is similar in that regard that it can only be recycled a couple of times, which was also new to me. I think it's a bummer that this video didn't mention any of this. You can have a great recycling concept, but using a lot of plastic still produces a lot of plastic that already went to through many recycling cycles. I guess there are already ways to lengthen the polymer chains, but it doesn't seem to be done on a large scale
You leave out that plastic recycling as a whole is a scam. This video is a poor exam as it’s a private company focusing on 1 specific product to recycle.
Same! I guess this makes a lot of sense why they have so many categories. We have separate recycling day for broken umbrellas, tvs, and another for glass jars. I’d love to see more about how each of these is processed!
This is interesting to see and also somewhat worrying when Paolo said that only 20% of all plastics are recycled in Japan. I assume some are burnt, resulting in harmful gases released into the air, and that the rest goes to landfill. Ask yourself if this is sustainable. If the answer is no, ask yourself what you can do to help reduce the amount of plastic (which takes decades to decompose), in the world.
Japan is often criticized by foreign countries for using too much plastic, so thank you for uploaded a video that helps people understand a little bit more about recycling plastic. We are doing our best to keep plastic out of the just trash as much as possible...
I wasn't aware of any criticism, but considering the whole world has the same addiction to plastic, I'm not sure why anyone thinks they can criticise anywhere else, especially since most people won't lift a finger to separate plastic until they are threatened with a fine of some sort
Just like the birth rate/the sui **de rate. Japan's birth rate is highest among developed Asian countries n higher than several Western ones with numerous immigrants. Its sui **de rate is not even in the world top 10. There're many with worse rate like Finland, Korea, Russia, the U.S. n Belgium etc. And yet the internet has been pretending Japan is uniquely bad in them. Pathetic.
@@rorychivers8769 That's for sure from what I have observed. North America also uses vast quantities of plastic and I doubt it recycles as much seen here ?
I watched a video on another RU-vid channel about the public’s job in separating and cleaning their recycling prior to collection and I couldn’t help thinking that this kind of public help in a recycling program would never work where I’m from because people would just refuse to comply. I think Japan’s commitment to helping in the process is amazing!
Imagine if every country had this kind of facility together with the community doing it's part of cleaning the used plastics. Also I like they purify and use the water. Nothing goes to waste.
I recently moved from Idaho, USA to Japan. There we had 1 rubbish bin, and it all went to the landfill. Now in Japan, we have like 30 categories of recycling. Neither country is perfect, but it’s fun making videos on the differences on my channel.
"Neither country is perfect," ...to the tune of USA producing 24% more municipal solid waste than 1 Billion people in China, who is the next biggest such polluter after USA. Countries are fine and dandy. PEOPLE of one country only pipe up when they start losing privileges. No wonder this video starts with "people were saying Japan uses too much palstic", it must be all Americans engaging in self-congratulatory projection about skipping a starbucks styrofoam cup.
You are uneducated on the matter. Plastic recycling on a whole is a scam. They are recycling 1 specific product and not plastics in general which is not cost effective to do. This is 1 product not all plastics.
@@zeitgeistx5239 that's true, recycling is mostly a scam and I think Wendover production actually made a video on it, many people still think recycling help so they continue the use of plastic products
hiring workers with handicaps, including recycling into children's education, reducing co2 emissions... i'm so thoroughly impressed by the process! while i'm more on the side of companies producing products that don't need to use so much plastic in the first place, it's amazing to see how japan takes responsibility for collecting and reusing the material! many kudos to all the people who clean and recycle those trays too. i live in japan right now and i usually see these hugs plastic bags outside of grocery stores that collect people's plastic trays for recycling, and now i get to know how they're likely collected and sent to the recycling centers! thanks so much for all the informative content, paolo!
lol I just bought kitkat imported from Japan, it say's by 2025 they (Nestle) will turn all outer package into something truly recyclable... that kitkat I bought has big package made of paper, I thought the inner small package would be too but no 😂 wrong expectation bcs I can't understand Japanese well 🤣🤣
Whilst I agree this plant is doing a great job of recycling plastics, Paolo mentioned that only 20% of the plastics Japan produces, is actually recycled.
Speaking of co2, I've heard that Japan's thermal plant is so efficient that if it transfers its technology to China and US, both countries can reduce the amount equal to Japan's entire CO2 emissions.
Whenever I stayed with family in Japan, I always thought how difficult it is to sort out the trash compared to the US. I imagined that Japan was doing a good job in terms of recycling so thank you for sharing this video!! I’ve always wanted to see how it worked
Fun Fact: There's actually a place in Japan called Kamikatsu Village which recycles ALMOST if not EVERYTHING from the typical trash. they literally have a list of 40 or more types of garbage seperation that all residents follows. when i first saw it, i am utterly ashamed that i can even laze around on throwing garbage on to a proper trashcan let alone seperate them >.
Their recycling rate sits at 80%. The problem is many plastics are just not recyclable. Many that are can only be recycled once or twice. It's nice of them to go so far but at some point the companies creating these plastics have to take responsibility for the waste they create. You cannot expect consumers to do everything, especially given that's actually impossible in the case of many plastics. In the end the vast majority of plastics are recycled once or twice and then they end up in the environment, poisoning water, food sources, and people. It's likely 1 cent or less to purchase paper serving trays over plastic ones. There is really no excuse for companies to be allowed to still use low density plastics for food which have the lowest recycling durability.
My general rule is, everything burns at high enough temperature >.> TBH tho general sorting is glass/plastic soda bottles(money back)/cardboard(bigger ones, not like cereal boxes) gets sorted. Everything else burns.
There is no pride in performing soulless manual labor. People should strive to make the world a better place for everyone that includes eliminating jobs that burn your mind out and wreck physical havoc onto your body. These types of jobs should be automated as much as possible so people can do more meaningful things in life.
@@ZeroInDaHouse Absolutely. It's really sad to see what kind of mind numbing work people have to do in order to survive in our world. But it's like ¾ of humanity has these kinds of jobs (or far worse). We should strive to automate such inhumane work and introduce something like UBI to compensate the people who will lose their jobs.
When I was living in Japan I had to sort my recyclables into about 15-20 different types of materials. All cleaned of course. Now I'm back in the states and I'm pretty sure everything I put in my recycle bin gets sold off to another country and then dumped in the ocean -_-
@@missplainjane3905 Wow. Such a deep question. Japan is such a juxtaposition. 1) Japan is an extremely advanced and developed country. You have Tokyo, which is the largest and most dense metropolitan system in the world. Also the most advanced and efficient public transit system in the world. But then at the same time it's not. I worked in a very rural area for the local Board of Education. In an office full of 30 workers, they only had 2 computers connected to the internet. Everybody had to share. And they were 10+ years out of date and frustrating to use. Japan is a country that embraces the new, but also refuses to let go of the old. 2) It gets an 8.5 / 10 for living there. It loses 1/2 point by being cramped and everything being tiny, even if at times that's part of it's charm. It looses a full point on housing, specifically lack of insulation. Most housing designs believe that dwellings should "breath", and central AC is a dream for 99.9% of houses. If it's summer, and you turn off your room's AC , and step out side for 10 minutes, when you go back your room is now the same temperature as outside. A friend of a friend lived in cold Hokkaido, and in winter about 15ish years ago - in order to prevent his toothpaste from freezing overnight in his bathroom, he'd put it in his refrigerator. 3) Japanese are some of the most welcoming and friendly people. They are also some of the racist and xenophobic people. At the same time. I feel that anybody who has lived there for more than 4-5 years could write a book on this. They are also some of the most hard working people. I met many people who would say the purpose of life is to work. That blew my mind. 4) I think I said it in the beginning best. Japan is a juxtaposition. If you're a tourist, you'll only see the very surface of it. It has many layers. This channel, Paolo, is the only Japanese themed entertainment youtuber that I subscribe to. Everybody else just shows tourist hype "wow so weird" type junk. I like Paolo's vids because they actually feel like they have a viewpoint from an insider in Japan, instead of looking in on Japan from the outside.
@@zengliren there is no cost to do it in your own home, only a couple minutes of time a day, a small price to pay for the sake of out one and only planet. Yah, capitalism sucks
@@logans3365, there is no monetary cost to do sorting in your own home, but to many calculative people, that few minutes work is also a cost of time, which in their mind is that unless they get paid for that effort, why should they do it. That is how people are being taught as they grow up, and hence it is so hard in some places to promote simple things like recycling.
These people are wonderful. When I came to Japan 20 years back our neighbor told us to wash plastic containers before throwing them in a garbage bin. We used to do that for many years. We also separated burnable and non burnable wastes. Now days it is not required as they have some machine which can separate plastic and burnable. By seeing all this things I started talking unique tours to Japan. There are so many things people don't know about Japan. Thanks Paolo-san. Great video indeed.
This is what makes the Japanese workforce amazing, their dedication and passion about every aspect of their work! OMG, these guys are inspirational - seriously!
when paolo asked " what do you do when it starts hurting" really stung like doesnt have a clue how average people at a job can't get away with taking a rest and often have to work through the pain.
It's amazing how clean that facility is. An American plant would have dirt and grim clinging to every hole and pieces of equipment. I can't imagine anyone in the west washing plastic before tossing it let alone before it was sent to a recycling plant. Quite the cultural difference.
this is what i love in Japan, children at their young age are taught how to be responsible in separating the plastics for recycling. I wish this can be done in the Philippines.
Not to be a Debbie Downer but it takes resource to process the water that pipe into people's home. Since Japan has plenty of snowfall, I am not considering the value of the water itself. And then from the video, they're using big trucks to ship the lightweight trays. The trucks use fossil fuel and emit CO2. I think it a noble effort but not sure what the net impact is compare to say, use less packaging in Japanese products.
@@TheMightyAgency Snowfall isn't the main source. It's mostly dams on river. People think JP has surplus amounts of water but it kinda doesn't. All the rain water flows in 1-2 days to the sea. Few places use from lake and underwater but that's it.
@@TheMightyAgency I totally agree! We should all be thinking about how much plastic we use and trying to reduce the plastic we consume. Reduce, reuse, recycle.
@@TheMightyAgency Agreed. I think quite a handful of people don't realize that it takes decent amount of energy to recycle (energy for hot water and melting, fossil fuels for transportation as you mentioned, etc, as well as man hours to manage the recycling process). It's definitely good to see that at least the recycling effort is good but I think the next step is trying to reduce and reuse now. I am curious though how much energy they manage to use to recycle a certain amount of plastics. I'm guessing they did some math to determine that it was worth the effort or something though but I am curious to see the numbers.
@@saifis It is awful attitude in EU&UK. I have never seen people wash any plastic wastes before go into trash, let alone select even local government encourage people and provide different type of trash bins.
@@may-ky6jl Really? I imaged they'd be super into recycling and all that considering how much they are pushing EV cars. Is the reasoning for that not environmental?
@@may-ky6jl I live in the UK and I wash all my recycling. However, I agree a lot of education is required in the UK regarding recycling. That said, recycling is a solution but in order to tackle climate change we need to consider reducing the amounts of plastic we consume.
Germany here. In general we have a high recycling rate. We have normal garbage, paper, glas, sometimes biodegradable and always plastik / metal. We only pay for the normal garbage, the rest is normally free of charge (in some towns you even get a reduced rate for the normal gabrage since they sell the recycling paper). In most towns only glas needs to be brought to a container, the rest is collected at your home. It is fairly common to sort out these things, more or less good. But seeing this, japan is reealy clean with their plastik. While it is also suggested here to clean out your plastik cups, remove different materials (e.g. the aluminium cover from your joghurt or the caps from glass bottles), this is veery rarely done. Most people simply toss it into the respective bin. And with plastik, we have big issues on what can be oput in and what not. Thing is, it is not only for recycling, but also because of a waste management programm that these garbage collection is already paid by the companies producing them (they are required to do this). So to be precise it is depending on what plastik, what size and if it is part of the program or not if it can go in the yellow bin for plastik and metal. But nearly nobody fully understands this - even people from the waste company who organize this and so are not clear, since it is reealy complicated. So normally we just dump everything plastik and metall-like into it, it gets colected and done. Also recycling for plastiks is in most cases thermic recycling - meaning it's burned for electricity, since it is too expensive and complicated to recycle most of this.
Hey! I'm a Water Treatment Plant operator in Canada. I can only imagine the infrastructure in Japan is amazing. Any chance of seeing inside those facilities too?
In Japan, way outside the city, there is poor infrastructure, masses of wires strung between buildings and no pavement etc.... Never really understood that part.
@@dune4433 Not really, there actually isnt a lot of plastics for the things we recieve. The chemicals we do recieve in plastics come in containers recycled by the companies who deliver them.
I love this. Omg it’s just insane how everyone would cooperate and wash their own plastic before recycling them. Just so awesome and highly civilised society.
Very sustainable, they burn more than half of their plastic waste and count it as 'recycling' because it generates some energy. In the meanwhile the burning is generating insane amounts of dirty emission gasses. The stuff that isn't burned is dumped in countries like Malaysia. Only a few specific kinds of plastics are getting recycled as seen in this video. Plastic recycling is a lie, we should just start to use way less plastic instead of lying to ourselves with this recycling dream, just so we don't have to change our habits.
To those who have been to japan know that they Japan thinks of everything to not go to waste. They’re are the number one example that every country should follow.
@@shiromochi-kun thanks for the encouragement, but…I’ve actually been here for 20 years already. (Maybe I’m a bit slow. 😆) But in my defense, they keep changing the rules in my area. And even the local people (who were born here, I mean) don’t seem to fully understand them. But I try. 頑張ります。
Japan, the best country in the world, do this to keep the environment clean and safe. Meanwhile, in other countries plastic goes to the ocean, a shame 😐 Great video Paolo! 👏👏👏
In the case of Japan, how low the environmental impact of incinerators at waste incineration plants is. How clean the carbon dioxide emissions of coal-fired power plants are in a completely different dimension from those of many other countries. I feel frustrated every time Japan is criticized by foreigners who do not know the facts.
We love your videos, but especially when you get an insight into daily life in Japan and their culture. Would love to have more of this... and with Wolfy, of course!! :D
My god!!! That is the cleanest recycling factory I have ever see. And I'm from DK so we do know a thing or two about recycling. I wish this was the standard for all over the world🙏❤
So, why can John Daub does this kind of well informed stream instead of unsing his kid ti peddle superchat. And, kept making fund Lester Holt for mispronuncing japanese when he can't/refused to pronounce his wife's name and kept saying "Weino" instead of Ueno. Don't agree that he is an hypocrite? I'm sure you do.
@@goukenslay7555 just watch his latest stream. He kept making fund of Lester HOlt. He has been making fund of him since the Olympic every chance he gets.
I really really admire Japan and it’s citizens. Not only they’re very nice and humble but also possesses traits of orderliness cleanliness and very disciplined. They are truly the envy of other countries.
the collected plastic waste looks so much cleaner than the ones anywhere else. no wonder the Japanese could set up these factories to recycle them. cant imagine this being done anywhere else
After visiting Japan I was curious how is the recycling process since in every AirBnB room I've got two bins: One for plastic and another for aluminium cans, but I've never knew that before throwing to the bin the plastic must be washed, now I feel bad for that Please for the next one: How in Japan recycle cans and plastic bottles
Back where I live we dump over 90% of the plastics to our landfills. It is highly inefficient and we will soon run out of space. We need to learn from Japan fast.
Hey Paolo, could you follow up on this and show the different types of recycling your local municipality does. I'm from the UK. For my council all plastics, metals and glass go into one recycling bin. Paper into another. Kitchen / organic waste into another. And everything else into landfill. So for me, I have 4 choices. The reason I suggest this is that I lived in Japan for 6 months and there were at least 10 different categories of recycling. So I know there are differences between Japan and the UK. Thanks!
When I visited Japan in 2008 I was surprised to learn that the clean their recyclables. After that I always tried to do the same as if it’s dirty it cannot be recycled.
Only in Japan that this happens. In Europe, the Americas, Middle Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceana and in many parts of the world, no one spends their time cleaning their waste. Just trash it and forget it. But Japan still has a long way to go to manage their waste as 20% of their plastic waste is recycled. Lots of room to improve recycling in Japan and the world. Also that’s the most cleanest trailer truck I’ve ever seen.
I wish America was as strict and respectful in recycling plastic waste as you guys are in Japan. Its common to see many Americans here disregard recycling completely, because they're too lazy. Not to mention we still have problems with people literally throwing their trash on the floor..
As the trays are a standard size and shape, it would be so much more sustainable to reuse containers instead of destroy and remake (recycle) them - I hope we can make progress towards lower impact and less wasteful solutions in Japan in the next few years. Thanks for sharing how the system works with this behind the scenes view. 😊
This is so amazing! I love the educational content being aware of plastic pollution. Oh only 20% of recycled are reused? However, looking at it, how much products are being made to something new.
everything in japan seems to be clean.even their trash is clean! it's insane how the japanese are so orderly.the world can definitely learn a lot from them.
Sorry to bust your bubble…households used to throw their waste in the ocean in the 60’s and they are throwing contaminated water in the ocean..sadly it is all just appearances
Got to love that all children in Japan learn about recycling from a young age. Also that the population is like one unit all doing their part to recycle clean and washed trays! Now that's how a country of millions should be like.