The country’s ubiquitous convenience stores throw out huge amounts of edible food. In Tokyo, Rachel Nuwer meets the campaigners trying to change that.
Riko Morinaga, a recent high school graduate in Tokyo, normally spends her weekend nights hanging with friends. But 3 February was different. That Saturday night was Setsuban, a Japanese holiday celebrating the transition into spring. It also happens to be one of Japan’s biggest food waste days.
Every year on Setsuban, stores across the country stock a holiday sushi roll called ehomaki. At the end of the night, hundreds of thousands of these rolls wind up in the garbage. “Shops always provide what customers want, which means their shelves have to always be stocked,” Morinaga says. “This contributes to the food loss problem.”
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Based on the data Morinaga and others gathered, Rumi Ide, an independent researcher, activist and journalist who coordinated the survey, extrapolated that Japan’s 55,657 convenience stores threw out 947,121 ehomaki rolls worth 700-800m yen ($4.5-5m; £3.6-4.1m). Ide published these results on the news website Yahoo Japan (unavailable in UK and Europe) to raise awareness about this hidden problem.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Based on the data Morinaga and others gathered, Rumi Ide, an independent researcher, activist and journalist who coordinated the survey, extrapolated that Japan’s 55,657 convenience stores threw out 947,121 ehomaki rolls worth 700-800m yen ($4.5-5m; £3.6-4.1m).
They have also come to epitomise how the country’s ubiquitous convenience stores – known for their dependable supply of perishable food items like sushi, sandwiches and pre-made dinners – play an outsized role in contributing to the issue.
Consumers are doubly burdened for the cost of prematurely removing food from store shelves, Ide says, including through higher prices built in to buffer against the inevitable losses, and taxes paid to cover local garbage incineration.
At this location, which I visited on a rainy spring day, the company’s usual bright blue and white lettering has been replaced with exuberant rainbow splotches that are colour-coded to match the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
As I step through the sliding glass doors, a chipper robotic greeter inside offers an explanation in Japanese: this is the company’s flagship “Green Lawson”, an experimental shop that aims to reduce waste.
The quantity and types of fresh foods that staff stock on shelves, for example, is determined by an artificial intelligence system whose predictive algorithm includes factors like weather forecasts, current events and past sales.
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