people are recycling AND properly sorting their recyclables. And, being reprimanded was very much a social issue - people felt very ashamed.
My American friend said that once, their recycling magically reappeared at their door with a note saying it wasn't properly sorted. He was amazed they knew who to take it back to, since they took it to the street - but after reading the article, I'm sure the americans were the only ones who would dare to do it wrong (and perhaps, the kinds of labels on their recyclables also gave them away).
This is the article I read:
http://www.cuke.com/misc/Japanese%20recycling.html<snip>
In Yokohama, after a few neighborhoods started sorting last year, some residents stopped throwing away their trash at home. Garbage bins at parks and convenience stores began filling up mysteriously with unsorted trash. "So we stopped putting garbage bins in the parks," said Masaki Fujihira, who oversees the promotion of trash sorting at Yokohama City's family garbage division.
Enter the garbage guardians, the army of hawk-eyed volunteers across Japan who comb offending bags for, say, a telltale gas bill, then nudge the owner onto the right path. One of the most tenacious around here is Mitsuharu Taniyama, 60, the owner of a small insurance business who drives around his ward every morning and evening, looking for missorted trash. He leaves notices at collection sites: "Mr. So-and-so, your practice of sorting out garbage is wrong. Please correct it. I checked inside bags and took especially lousy ones back to the owners' front doors," Mr. Taniyama said. He stopped in front of one messy location where five bags were scattered about, and crows had picked out orange peels from one. "This is a typical example of bad garbage," Mr. Taniyama said, with disgust. "The problem at this location is that there is no community leader. If there is no strong leader, there is chaos."
He touched base with his lieutenants in the field. On the corner of a street with large houses, where the new policy went into effect last October, Yumiko Miyano, 56, was waiting with some neighbors. Ms. Miyano said she now had 90 percent compliance, adding that, to her surprise, those resisting tended to be "intellectuals," like a certain university professor or an official at Japan Airlines up the block.
"But the husband is the problem - the wife sorts her trash properly," one neighbor said of the airlines family.
Getting used to the new system was not without its embarrassing moments. Shizuka Gu, 53, said that early on, a community leader sent her a letter reprimanding her for not writing her identification number on the bag with a "thick felt-tip pen." She was chided for using a pen that was "too thin." "It was a big shock to be told that I had done something wrong," Ms. Gu said. "So I couldn't bring myself to take out the trash here and asked my husband to take it to his office. We did that for one month."
<snip>
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