Japan's plastic problem: Tokyo spearheads push at G20 to tackle waste

[nitpicker]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/27/japans-plastic-problem-tokyo-spearheads-push-at-g20-to-tackle-waste

Japan's plastic problem: Tokyo spearheads push at G20 to tackle waste

Justin McCurry in Osaka

Thu 27 Jun 2019 07.02 BST Last modified on Thu 27 Jun 2019 09.27 BST

One of the joys of traveling on Japan’s bullet trains is tucking into an ekiben “station bento”. But it is also a reminder of the country’s addiction to plastic. The Guardian’s ekiben, eaten en route to this week’s G20 summit in Osaka, contained no fewer than nine individual pieces of plastic, from functional sachets for sauce and mustard to purely decorative slivers of fake grass.

In the run-up to the gathering of world leaders, Japan has vowed to spearhead international efforts to tackle plastic waste – an environmental catastrophe its citizens said they wanted prioritised at the two-day meeting, which opens on Friday.

But campaigners say Japan – the world’s second-biggest producer of plastic waste per capita after the US – must also do more to deal with the rubbish piling up on its own doorstep.

Japanese consumers get through about 30bn plastic shopping bags a year. Osaka Bay, a stone’s throw from the G20 venue, contains an estimated three million plastic shopping bags and six million other pieces of plastic, according to a study by Osaka University of Commerce, cited by Bloomberg.

While the European parliament passed legislation in March to ban single-use plastic in all member states by 2021, Japan, along with the US, failed to sign the G-7 plastics charter last year, which would have committed it to reuse, recycle and collect all plastic products by 2030. Instead, the government has committed itself to a less ambitious 25% reduction in single-use plastic by 2030.

A cultural preference for elaborate packaging is partly to blame – consumers associate carefully wrapped items with luxury and high-end customer service. Aesthetically pleasing but unnecessary packaging in supermarkets, shops and platform bento stands, have left Japan struggling to cope.
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[Duppers]

1. China also has a penchant for elaborate packaging.

What I saw in Shanghai and in Beijing bothered me.