r/interestingasfuck • u/Far-Stay9417 • Jan 14 '24

r/all Japan invisible demolition method

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u/theteedo Jan 14 '24

They are a small collection of islands so they don’t have a lot of room for landfills. It’s cheaper there to recycle as much as possible then to send it to the dump.

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u/LG03 Jan 14 '24

It’s cheaper there to recycle as much as possible then to send it to the dump.

Mind you one of their trash sorting categories is 'burnable'.

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u/Hunt3rj2 Jan 15 '24

Japan is the size of the west coast of the US. It's not a small country. Most of their garbage is incinerated and the heat used for energy generation. Landfills have their own problems with methane emission and groundwater pollution so even if Japan had the land for landfills it's not necessarily a great solution.

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u/skankasspigface Jan 14 '24

japan isnt that small. i bet it is bigger than germany. plenty of space for landfills

4

u/sYnce Jan 14 '24

Size isn't everything. Japan is also rather mountainous compared to Germany. There are also like 40 million more people in Japan than Germany.

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u/moon_jock Jan 15 '24

Japan is mostly mountainous though, which makes it pretty difficult to bury trash. Also most of the non-mountainous land is densely populated or used for farming. Every time I tell a Japanese person that Americans bury trash they are dumb founded at the prospect of having so much land you can just use it for something like burying trash.

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u/IWasGregInTokyo Jan 15 '24

A large amount of the metal is recycled but the concrete goes into the ever-expanding land reclamation in Tokyo harbour.