Recycling Rosetta – Why?

Back of a package of cookies with many labels and information

A few days back, I wrote a blog entry about the Recycling Rosetta Stone. The raison d’être of that table – besides me being a nerd – is that with globalisation, products are often annotated for many areas, and the recycling instruction will not be for the most convenient for you, but the one area which has the strongest recycling regulations.

The image attached to this post is a typical example, this is the back of a package of butter cookies, with a lot of information. The symbol on the lower right is the green dot, which tells that the producers participates in that scheme, but does not give any useful information on how to recycle that box.

The only concrete recycling symbols are in the lower right, and are Japanese (I highlighted them in red). The upper symbol is for paper with some text (外箱) explaining this is the outer package. The lower symbol is plastic with some text explaining this is the inner tray (内装トレー).

It certainly would be more convenient to have the recycling information in all languages, but here it is only available in Japanese. Now it is pretty obvious that the outer box is cardboard, but having some kind of confirmation, that it is only cardboard with no plastic or aluminium addition is already something. From the symbols you can at least guess that there is a paper / cardboard part and a plastic part.

Now I still need to add plastic to the rosetta file, sadly this is far from trivial as there are many recycling schemes and many plastic types.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.