A series about being eco-friendly in your day-to-day life in Japan.
Outside of my apartment building sits our soil factory box. It’s half-filled with incredible planting soil—the result of a year and a half of bokashi composting by the two of us. It’s actually quite astonishing to see over a year’s food scraps broken down to such a minimal volume! But the reason that I know…
Composting can be a drag. As earth-friendly as it sounds, it’s not simple, where throwing your food into a garbage can is. You need to work at it—make a neat garbage pile in your yard, rake it all the time to aerate and prevent stinky and dangerous mold growth, and deal with vermin who see…
Part of the reason I decided to start writing for the Times was to hold myself accountable for my beliefs. And I’m not ashamed to say that a huge obstacle lies between my proclaimed dedication to the art of sustainability and its practice: I’m a lazy bastard. Well, I guess I’m not that lazy. I fill…
Around the time that I got wind of my acceptance into the JET program was when I also first stumbled upon a blog called “The Zero Waste Home,†written by a California mother named Bea Johnson, whose family had collectively decided that they had trashed the world enough. Their level of conservativeness is what some…