Recycling: Not just Japan, but almost everywhere

So I've just arrived back from Japan where recycling is like a religious practice. In my guest house we had bins seperated by glass, cans, aluminium and rubbish. The rubbish section included plastics and even yucky molded food. Despite the fact that we had already seperated the rubbish in the kitchen, these bags had to go into another ;combustible 燃えるゴミ or non-combustible　燃えないゴミ.

So normal rubbish went to the combustible bins and the rest went into non-combustible bins.

Thinking that Japan was ahead of London time I just discovered how much of a twit I am. Good ol' wikipedia can never fail when it comes to trivial information as it states, 

Woodbury, New Jersey was the first city in the entire United States to mandate recycling.^[7] Led by Rose Rowan^[8]in the early 1970s, the idea of towing a "recycling" trailer behind a waste management vehicle to enable the collection of trash and recyclable material at the same time emerged. Other towns and cities soon followed suit, and today many cities in the U.S. make recycling a requirement.

Then it says of Japan,

Massive government promotion campaigns were carried out in World War II in every country involved in the war, urging citizens to donate metals and conserve fibre, as a matter of significant patriotic importance. Resource conservation programs established during the war were continued in some countries without an abundance of natural resources, such as Japan, after the war ended.

Well well, what is there to say about London? Pathetic! Far behind from NY or Japan on the whole. Fix up London seriously!! My family wasn't going crazy over recycling because it wasn't enforced like these cities.  Let's hope the government does something about it for the betterment of UK-ites.

Anyway,

Cleaning my new apartment with Erik on the Upper East Side (as you do,) recycling became a very important issue (to me.) Turns out that I have to seperate things here too, BUT, the seperation of goods are different and a little bit easier. It's mix paper (including cardboard) together and beverage cartons, bottles, cans, metal & foil into another. I suppose the plastic and the disgusting stuff can be stuffed up together. More technical stuff like furniture, electric goods or metals obviously require further seperation processes. As of now, I'm dealing with boxes from bed, bath and beyond and Ikea so that will be an easy situation to solve - SHOVE IT IN Together! LOL

Oh another thing - when recycling the bags have to be transparent. Off to the shops I go! Here is the NYC's sanitation characters. Encouraging and cute, no?