Litter-Free Japan and Switzerland (how do they do it?)
If you ever visit Japan, you’ll be amazed. Literally not one tiny piece of litter on the ground (people find bins or take it home with them – even on the subway where bins were removed, after a terrorist attack.
People in Japan even carry little bottles of water, to ‘wash the pavement’, after their dogs poop!
Why? For two reasons:
- One is that as an isolated set of islands and mountains, there are no places to ‘shove everything in landfills’. One town even has 45 recycling categories!
- The other is ”Meiwaki’. This word means to avoid causing trouble to others, and this includes not dropping litter.
Just like Quakers don’t play the lottery (because someone desperate has likely spent their electricity bill on a ticket so it’s their money you are winning), Japanese people know that if they drop litter, someone else has got to pick it up. And children, pets or wildlife could be cut from dropped glass.
Locals even play a game ‘Spogomi’, to see who can pick up the most litter, in the least time. In East London, groups have used litter-picking kits to do the same, on Hackney Marshes.
The only ‘anti-litter signs’ in Japan are tourists, as they are the only ones that leave litter behind.
Switzerland (Completely litter-free?)
Not quite, but almost. Switzerland is now suffering with some littering problems, but it’s a lot better than here. Unlike here (where it’s also illegal to drop litter), in Switzerland if you drop a sweet wrapper, sandwich box or cigarette butt, a policeman will come up and arrest you.
It’s illegal to drop litter in England, but many people don’t take much notice. Despite councils having the power to fine and issue Litter Abatement Orders to private landowners.
Recently, the Swiss government has upped the fines. Throwing away just a sandwich wrapper or cigarette butt will be a standard fine (around £90). Or £180 for 2 items of litter. And larger fines from £200 to around £18,000 (20,000 Swiss Francs).
How Strict Rules Keep Streets Clean
In Switzerland, dropping litter is on a par with theft. Many cantons (regions) set on-the-spot fines for dropping rubbish, with harsh penalties for serious or repeated offences. Daily checks are carried out by council staff. As a result, it’s never the case that you get there what you get here:
- Rivers clogged with years-old rubbish
- Streets with dropped cans, bottles and litter.
- Supermarket surrounded by litter.
- People dropping litter out of car windows.
It helps that Switzerland (like most of Europe) has deposit return schemes, where people get money back, if returning their bottles or cans to vending machines.
The law has been delayed in the UK, as the English government does not want glass bottles included. Yet many countries have included glass in deposit return schemes for decades.
In countries with deposit return schemes, plastic bottle recycling is over 80%, cans above 90% and glass around 95%. Some people even make an income, just going around hovering up litter, and getting money for popping it back into machines!
Clean Up UK has a wonderful nationwide army of litter-picking volunteers. But it’s disheartening for them, to see streets soon swimming in rubbish again.
If they knew that the litter would not return (thanks to fines, deposit return schemes, zero waste packaging and more litter bins), their work would be more rewarding.
