Japan: full speed ahead with recycling!

45 categories of waste separation, including bottles with dark glasses, transparent glasses, soft paper tubes, rigid cardboard tubes, various plastics, caps and milk of all sorts.

Yes because the goal of this small Japanese town of just under 1500 souls that bears the name of Kamikatsu, is to reach the year 2020 without producing more waste, totally zero waste .

The " Zero Waste " objective is and will be possible thanks to the cooperation between the inhabitants and the efficient local administration, we discover together how.

Kamikatsu's strengths

In Kamikatsu there is first of all a well-articulated and well-divided written guide that explains to people, year by year, the methods of disposal and differentiation of waste.

The operators of the sector, for their part, have specialized and are able to recycle more and more different types of materials, differentiating and increasing the categories from year to year.

Secondly, when the citizens themselves have to carry everything there is to be disposed of from their own home to the collection point, they literally work to make the subdivision for disposal ; only in this way do they really realize how many useless things - packaging, papers, plastics - are often produced and placed on the market.

As a result, they are more attentive to what they buy, they buy more intelligently, avoiding waste of content and materials, preferring the sale of loose products and local markets. Here are the two strong points and why such a system is working.

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Intelligent barter, that's Kurukuru

Inside the waste disposal point there is also a shop called "Kurukuru" which means "circle" in Japanese, where people can deposit what they want and take away what they need, all for free.

A sort of self-managed barter shop that encourages and attracts people to the collection point, encouraging exchange and positive communication.

This, together with a good publicity and an effective word of mouth that started from the members of the municipality itself, meant that the service could work and really enjoy. Now, the waste point has become a real circle not only of materials, but of aggregation of people .

More than 200 visitors every year want to know and imitate the example of this city, here is the video that describes it well.

My home "zero waste"

Therefore, it seems that the must of the moment, at every latitude, is minimalism and art but the " decluttering " so admirably carried out by modern Japan - Marie Kondo docet - and by its most ancient traditions.

If you too felt the desire to start saving on packaging and to dispose of them more consciously. For example, one can start by reorganizing domestic environments, especially the kitchen.

Starting from here, from the heart of the house, once the superfluous has been eliminated, the spaces organized and divided up and collected in comfortable glass vases, as this short video illustrates, you will carry out your small and immense revolution, made up of purchases aware, expenses at the local market, targeted shopping at the mill and at the farm, using half the time and half the money you would spend in a hypermarket!