Consumption and Waste
It’s a wild thing to relocate from Mexico to Japan, for many many reasons. But I am thinking a lot right now about consumption and waste.
Japan has the world’s most extensive bullet train system, with railways criss-crossing the country reducing the reliance on cars. The majority of new cars being sold are hybrid or electric (compared to the US, where only 16% of cars sold last year were hybrid or EV). I’ve met a few fantastic climate tech accelerators and sustainability impact investors, and if you think about it, ancient kelp farms have built the foundation for much of the cuisine. One would expect Japan to be way ahead on all things sustainability.
In Mexico many cars still run on diesel, with fumes filling the otherwise clean streets. Buses and cars are the only real option for ground travel in the country. GDP per capita in Mexico is $10k USD, and in Japan it’s $40k. I expected to see Japan with more capacity and investment in mitigating the climate crisis but in our daily experiences, the opposite was true. In Oaxaca we were so much more aware of our consumption and waste.
In Oaxaca we were regularly reminded of the extreme drought in the area. Since each home has individual gas tanks and water pumped into cisterns for our hot water, we were very attentive to our usage. We had to separate our compost, plastics and trash or face fines.
In Kyoto there’s not only no public composting infrastructure, but each apple at the market is wrapped in many layers of plastic. The fruit is perfect and pretty, but I’d happily trade that for a few bruises and piles of fruit at the market, transported in baskets or reusable cloth bags!
In Tokyo shopping is a major pastime, with the new and shiny being of such high value. Vending machines are on every corner. Waste is separated into bottles/glass for recycling, the rest being “burnable” which includes all that plastic packaging, food waste and other garbage.
The cities in Japan are immaculate – the trash is washed before being put out for pickup, but it feels like we’re sanitizing and invisibilizing a lot of environmental damage and waste. It’s the same in the US, of course. We as a population are not attentive to our waste because of the many conveniences in our life that lead to its invisibility.
When I looked into this a tiny bit, I saw that Japan does outperform the US and Mexico on the Sustainable Development Goals at a systemic level, and that Japan’s incineration of trash has both pros and cons, but that the country has a low recycling rate and is indeed among the world’s largest consumers of single-use plastic (second only to the US per capita).
Experiencing the shift in our way of life between Oaxaca and Kyoto has been striking. Oaxaca’s culture also feels so deeply connected to the earth — careful with resources and thoughtful about consumption and waste. Japan’s urban consumerist culture feels closer to the one I know at home in the US.
I’m left wondering how to be more mindful of my waste and consumption, even when it’s less visible in my day-to-day.
