Quite a long time ago in the UK,  food manufacturers moved mostly away from the “tetrapak” system for milk, juice and such-like. These days milk comes mostly in plastic bottles and juice comes in card packs with a small plastic pouring spout with a screw-on cap. In Japan they’re still using tetrapak for milk and juice. This might be something to do with recycling (card packaging can be burnt whereas plastics release some horrible chemicals when you burn them).

Japan has been held up as a paragon of recycling in the past, but I’m wondering if they haven’t been overtaken by some Western European countries recently. In most areas of the UK we now have kerbside recycling collections of a range of packaging possibly including card, paper, tin cans, drinks cans, PET plastic bottles and glass. Certainly recycling stations in major towns have stations for the recycling of these things even if they’re not (all) collected from the house. Some places, such as the Meiji University building where I’m working, do quite a lot of separation of rubbish – into “glass, plastic and cans”, “burnable waste” and “non-burnable waste”. There seems to be little effort to recycle paper and card (it goes into the burnable waste section). At the Guest House, however, there’s only recycling of tin cans and bottles. Everything else is put in together.