I went to McDonald's here the other day and I found myself in a debacle. Kim and I ate at the restaurant, and as we were throwing our trash away, we found ourselves unsure if we should throw the whole cup in the trash, lid and all, or if the lid and straw needed to be separated. Why did this happen, you may be wondering. Well, let me tell you about trash in Japan. It has to be separated into 4 main categories: 1) burnable 2) non-burnable 3) plastic and 4) PET bottles. Each type is collected on a specific day, depending on where you live. They have schedules printed so you know when to put what out. There are collection bins where you put the bags. Your name should be written on the bag, and when the bag is full of plastics, you should write "pura" on the outside. (pura= purasuchiku... say it fast and drop some vowels, you will get it, bear in mind that there is no "ti" sound in Japanese... so replace the chi with ti if you are still having trouble)
Burnables include: scrap paper and tissues, small toys, kitchen waste
Non-burnables are metals, small, regular light bulbs
Plastics are the bottle lids and wrappers.
And PET bottles are the plastic bottles. But you have to take off the wrapper and lid and put them into pura.
So there are a few other categories... milk cartons are their own thing and they have to be rinsed out, and then cut apart and tied together. Cardboard has to be flattened and then tied together. Stacks of cardboard cannot be more than 20cm tall. Paper is the same, tied together and not more than 20cm tall. Batteries never, ever, ever go out with any of this trash. There are two specific collection days a year for batteries. Larger objects have to be taken specially and quite often there is a charge for the really big ones like chairs, TVs, couches, etc. Fluorescent light bulbs also have some special procedure, but I have no idea what it is.
You may be thinking, "wow, Elissa, how are you handling this garbage situation?" And the answer is for the most part is: its fine. Most of my garbage is either burnable or plastic. Unfortunately I have a lot of PET bottles, and I haven't figured out how to get rid of them because apparently they are not collected from the usual collection bin. So I just have them sitting in my garage with the cardboard. I tried to put the cardboard out and I was all excited because it did not get returned to my door. A few days later I was taking out my pura and there was my cardboard, still sitting in the collection bin! Apparently in Iiyama, if the garbage is not correct, they just leave it forever and ever. In other cities, I have heard that your trash magically is returned to your door for you to sort properly, but it seems that is not the case for me in Iiyama. I have been told that I can take PET bottles to a convenience store to get rid of them, but I am sort of afraid of looking crazy when I pull in with my three bags of bottles and stand there for 20 minutes putting them in the bin one at a time through the little round hole that is perfectly bottle-sized. I should just go sometime at midnight... if I am going to look crazy, I might as well go all out!
Back to the McDonald's situation... after much debate, Kim and I decided to just ask the guy at the counter and he just took the cups back from us. That's one solution to the problem, but it did not answer the question!!!
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