Reducing plastic consumption

Next to impossible, especially in a country like Japan. Do we honestly need one zucchini in a plastic tray?

Young family and taking so many medicines already...

It’s not helped by the stores, either. I bought a fish in a plastic tray that was wrapped in plastic and the cashier put it in another plastic bag. Why? It might leak. So three pieces of plastic for one fish.

To keep cookies fresh each cookie is wrapped in its own little plastic wrapper and then they’re all put in a bigger plastic bag.

Buying crackers, cookies and other kinds of baked goods in Japan has always amazed me. Everything is wrapped three times. By the time you finish a box of cookies you have more plastic than cookies. The plastics industry in Japan is huge with many extremely large companies employing tens of thousands of people. This means, it is very unlikely to see any kind of push to eliminate plastics use in Japan.

Love Plastic. Brilliant invention.

It's such a hassle trying to get the stores to not give me plastic. I was buying four pastry items and they were going to put each in a separate small plastic sleeve then put them into a big plastic bag. I told them I didn't need the sleeves and just put them all in the big bag. They just could not understand what it was I wanted them to do. Finally, one of the ladies asked me, "So what do you want us to do?" So I grabbed the one plastic bag and put them all in there. Ta da. They were like, "Oh....".

This is just one of probably five or six incidents a week of trying to get stores to give me as little or no plastic or future garbage as possible. If ask for no bag, they follow up with, "How about a plastic spoon?" or "A wetnap?", "A small plastic sleeve?"

I'm always nice and polite about it but it's aggravating.

Ah yes, plastic. One isolated example of this ridiculousness. I bought 3 husband/wife tea cup sets to take as gifts to family back home. Asked if I wanted gift wrapping I said no thank you, reminding them of customs restrictions. Ah, so desu. However, it seemed that part of the employees' job included wrapping. So I demurred and they proceeded to bubble wrap the cups. When they were done, each packet was the size of a rugby ball. Much too much to fit into a suitcase. Needless to say, I was forced to unwrap it all and recycle the waste.

I have never understood why Japan abandoned furoshiki and why there hasn't been a concerted effort to bring that excellent practice back as the cultural norm.