A few days before New Years, as part of our annual household cleaning, my wife made a small change to our recycling and trash sorting. Rather than put plastics, the kind food comes in, not PET bottles, into the general nama gomi (basic trash), she made a separate sort in the same box with our unburnable trash. Most plastic is not recyclable where we live, the exceptions being PET plastics and Styrofoam food trays which are not picked up but can be recycled elsewhere.

It took only a few days of normal shopping and eating to realize how much plastic garbage we generate. Even after I cut the clamshell trays in half and matched and stacked them with similar sized trays, the bag we were using was soon full. Meanwhile, the normal garbage was not filling up nearly as fast, meaning there soon was an odor coming from it.

I don’t know for sure how recyclable plastic food trays actually are. I think it depends on where you live and what potential uses there are locally. But rather than worry about if or how to recycle plastics, wouldn’t it be much better to switch to some sort of bio-degradable paper-based packaging? I do my part as best I can to limit how much plastic enters our home. I always use a reusable shopping bag, and have for all the years I have lived in Japan after doing the same back in Oregon. And if I am getting take out I always try to bring the food home in reusable ‘tupper’ container, as Tupperware and the like are called in Japan.

Time to take out another plastic bag filled with plastic. No need for any photos on this post.