YOKOHAMA, Japan - When this city recently doubled the number of garbage categories to 10, it handed residents a 27-page booklet on how to sort their trash. Highlights included detailed instructions on 518 items.
Lipstick goes into burnables; lipstick tubes, "after the contents have been used up," into "small metals" or plastics. Take out your tape measure before tossing a kettle: under 12 inches, it goes into small metals, but over that it goes into bulky refuse.
Socks? If only one, it is burnable; a pair goes into used cloth, though only if the socks "are not torn, and the left and right sock match." Throw neckties into used cloth, but only after they have been "washed and dried."
"It was so hard at first," said Sumie Uchiki, 65, whose ward began wrestling with the 10 categories last October as part of an early trial. "We were just not used to it. I even needed to wear my reading glasses to sort out things correctly."
To Americans struggling with sorting trash into a few categories, Japan may provide a foretaste of daily life to come. In a national drive to reduce waste and increase recycling, neighborhoods, office buildings, towns and megalopolises are raising the number of trash categories - sometimes to dizzying heights.
Indeed, Yokohama, with 3.5 million people, appears slack compared with Kamikatsu, a town of 2,200 in the mountains of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands. Not content with the 34 trash categories it defined four years ago as part of a major push to reduce waste, Kamikatsu has gradually raised the number to 44.
In Japan, the long-term push to sort and recycle aims to reduce the amount of garbage that ends up in incinerators. In land-scarce Japan, up to 80 percent of garbage is incinerated, while a similar percentage ends up in landfills in the United States.
The environmentally friendlier process of sorting and recycling may be more expensive than dumping, experts say, but it is comparable in cost to incineration.
"Sorting trash is not necessarily more expensive than incineration," said Hideki Kidohshi, a garbage researcher at the Center for the Strategy of Emergence at the Japan Research Institute. "In Japan, sorting and recycling will make further progress."
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