Any Japanese politician could solve Japan’s plastic crisis and be a national hero if they championed outlawing all single-use plastic food packaging, forcing the entire country to switch to compostable food packaging.
At the moment, Japan seems to be allergic to sustainable packaging material, resulting in a massive amount of plastic waste, for no good reason at all. I’ll never understand it, it blows my mind on a weekly basis.
Removing plastic from single-use food packaging coupled with similar near-immediate transitions to eliminate plastic bags at konbini and grocery stores would reduce the amount of plastic the country wastes dramatically. It would be an overnight success story for whoever wants to do it.
This is a common problem in wealthy nations, with a known and easy solution. It’s not the most cost-effective in the short-term, which is likely why it’s not being done. But it would likely be more cost-effective long-term.
Wealthy nations in particular have to eliminate their plastic consumption, but it’s being constantly thwarted by what amounts to recycling propaganda. The public believes that this plastic is being recycled. But what’s closer to the truth is that it’s just being offloaded to poorer Southeast Asian countries to maybe recycle a tiny bit of it.
Offloading the plastic is not the same as offloading the responsibility. But that’s exactly why it’s still a problem.

There’s this thing I remember from The West Wing, where an updated threshold to determine what is considered poverty “increased” the amount of poor people in the United States.
Those people were poor before the threshold was redefined, even though it looked as if the number of poor people spiked.
I think about that with regard to plastic consumption.
Not all places in the world will use the same definition for what constitutes plastic “waste,” which makes it nearly impossible to look at per-capita plastic waste comparisons.
The amount of plastic I alone end up wasting just from being a person living in Japan skyrocketed compared to when I lived in the US, even if statistics don’t back that up. That makes me skeptical.
What I’m getting at is—if you really count all the plastic, if you really look at how much plastic waste is generated in Japan—it’s probably going to look really bad. It’s going to look much worse per capita than what is reported. Because the definition of plastic waste may exclude plastic that isn’t separated, plastic that’s offloaded to other countries, plastic that’s allegedly recycled, and plastic that’s burned.
Basically, what’s not counted is which plastic is avoidable. To me, that’s the definition of waste.

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