Tokyo’s eco fashion for groceries
TOKYO–”Eco” as fashion statement has definitely hit Japan’s capital–a jam-packed city of 8 million-plus, not including outlying areas.
Just visit one of Tokyo’s most eclectic home-shopping stores, Tokyo Hands, located in Shibuya. It’s eight floors of do-it-yourself and oddball items ranging from teak wood slabs for making your own coffee table to plastic toe stretchers. It’s also sprinkled with the latest environmentally friendly goods.
Here I found these “Eco Home Kitchen Bags” from Benetton–a rainbow-colored tastemaker in the 80s. A reusable bag for grocery shopping, the eco sack rolls up into a tiny case that you can port around in a pocket or stick to the refrigerator when not in use. Doubtful you can find this exact product in the United States, but similar gear is common in cities like San Francisco, which just banned the use of plastic bags in major grocery stores.
With so little space in Japan, citizens must conserve in as many ways possible. The recycling program, for example, is intense. Businesses and households are legally required to separate recyclable material into as many as nine different bins, including compost (food stuff) to burnable items to specific types of plastics. Similarly, the hotels here unplug consumer electronics like coffee pots that aren’t in use to conserve energy and will donate proceeds from unused toiletries in the room, through a program called Green Dimes.
Despite these efforts, wastefulness in Tokyo, like any big city, is rampant. Disposable chopsticks, for example, are a staple of every restaurant and fried fish stand. Plastic bags are doled out at every local store and American convenience stores like AM/PM and 7 Eleven, which are huge here.
Still, I’m hopeful that in such a fashionable city as Tokyo (not far from where the Kyoto protocols for the environment were signed) eco chic will eventually catch on.
February 20th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
[…] TOKYO–One recent morning while I was hurrying into Shinjuku station here to catch the metro, I stopped at Starbucks for a small coffee and one of those really tasty sweet brown rice scones that they have in Japan. […]
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