Today, I plan to go to my workshop and do some work, but before that, I went out in the morning to throw away some bulky waste from my house.
In my town, regular burnable garbage is collected near our homes twice a week, but large non-burnable items have a special collection system. There are two ways to dispose of them: you can either make a reservation by phone and have the town pick them up from your home, or you can take them yourself to the town’s waste collection center. If you choose home pickup, the fee is a flat 500 yen. You can choose the day, but not the time. The staff will come and collect it as long as you leave it inside your property. However, I don’t like leaving things outside when I’m not home, so I always take my bulky waste directly to the collection center. The center is open only on weekday and Saturday mornings. Of course, it’s a public facility of town. Today, as you can see in the photo, I brought two chairs and a handheld vacuum cleaner. Both were quite old 😅 I had used the chairs for about 20 years, so the seat coverings were coming apart. After loading the bulky items into my car, I headed to the center. At the entrance, there’s a huge scale built into the road—you drive your car right onto it to weigh everything. Then you unload your waste at the designated area and drive back onto the scale again. The difference in weight is used to calculate the fee. For bulky waste brought directly to the center, the cost is 100 yen per 10 kilograms. So if the total weight exceeds 50 kilograms, it’s actually cheaper to have it collected from home. Today, mine was 10 kilograms, so the fee was 100 yen (plus 10% tax, which makes it 110 yen).
On weekdays, there are usually almost no regular visitors except for company trucks, but maybe because it’s Saturday today, about three cars were lined up after me. In Japan, people have a custom of doing a big house cleaning at the end of the year, so the waste collection center gets very crowded once December begins. That’s why my family is taking our large garbage there now, while it’s still not so busy. By the way, I went there last week too! My family doesn’t do the year-end big cleaning because it’s too cold! 😂 So we clean little by little while it’s still warm. Right now, I’m tidying up the house a bit. After many years of living same place, I feel like unnecessary things have increased. I’m trying to make my house feel a little more open and airy (though it’s not a big house! 🤣).
By the way, for smaller things I no longer need—like small appliances, books, or CDs—I take them to a recycle shop. Well, it doesn’t bring in much money, but there are many secondhand shops around. I actually went to sell some things the other day too. I’ll talk about that tomorrow.
