Recycling is the low-hanging fruit of sustainable living. The
Silicon Valley town in which I grew up has had recycling pickup services for over 20 years. As I travel around Dubai and the
United Arab Emirates, I see how my hosts struggle in vain to demonstrate why recycling is important. Their task is difficult: recycling pickup has not rolled out yet in Dubai, so they take the trouble of separating paper, glass and plastic and take it to various recycling centers in their section of the city. Most people would not go through that trouble.
But they do in Kamikatsu, a small town home about 2000 people in rural Shikoku,
Japan. In my
latest article on
Earth911.com, I share the long
waste diversion journey the citizens in this town have taken to avoid landfill, incineration and mounting trash. Kamikatsu is a true
zero waste town with all of the effort and none of the public relations. Various centers across the town have 34 different recycling bins, where items from unwanted shoes to ball point pens to cigarette lighters each have their own final resting place before they are reused, hauled away or recycled. In an interview and series of follow up emails with local councilman
Takuya Matsumoto, this system has endured for several years because the town’s finances are better off and the young learn better habits from the time they can walk.
Read the full article here; and be mindful of what you throw away, because that trash or even that
unwanted appliance has
got to go somewhere. You may think it’s not in your backyard, but you may very well be
breathing it.
Photo courtesy Takuya Matsumoto.
