A street near Kyutech
My first stop is the Kyushu Institute of Technology(Kyutech), located in Kitakyushu, Fukuoka. Kitakyushu is a small city whose area is 100km2 (50 square miles) smaller than Columbus, and one fourth of the Beijing’s area. With tidy streets, clean buildings and nice urban greening, it is pretty hard to imagine that this was one of the most polluted cities in Japan.
A street near downtown of Kitakyushu
After living here for several days, I understood the reasons of this good environment, more or less. In Kyushu community, everyone has responsibility to categorize waste properly. For example, Paper waste should be bundled by strings. Under the paper category, there are some sub-categories: flyers and posters, newspapers, cartons and boxes, corrugated paper board(if boxes, they should be cut into boards), etc. Different sub-categories of paper waste should be placed separately as the guide on public garbage containers. BE CAREFUL!! Sometimes posters do not belong to ”paper” but ”combustible garbage”, because some posters have glue remains, which cannot be recycled like paper. The milk containers which have plastic caps should be categorized separately, with paper boxes in ”paper” and plastic caps in ”plastic(not PET)”. The waste recycling and sorting rules might be different from place to place, but some Japanese students told me they were usually very restrict. Luckily, for international students, there are some tolerance on those rules.
This is the part of my experience on waste recycling and sorting in Japan. I will add some photos of Kitakyushu and Kyutech as long as I received them(I left them in my home PC in China). If you have any idea or comment on this blog, please do not hesitate to tell me.
Thanks for reading.
Qianli Feng