This unusual tip will shrink your boxes, making them much easier to handle.
Dealing with household garbage is a whole process in Japan. Here, residents are required to separate burnable waste from non-burnable waste, with burnables being picked up once or twice a week and non-burnable waste around once a month, and then separate everything else for various collection dates, in categories such as plastic, PET bottles, PET bottle lids, tins, brown glass, clear glass, green glass, cardboard, newspapers, glossy magazines and pamphlets, milk cartons, oversized garbage, gas cannisters, and that’s not even a conclusive list.
With so many different categories, each with different rules for how clean/empty/large each item should be, managing your household garbage can be a hard system to master, especially when residents don’t have trash bins outside their homes like many people do abroad, instead taking their trash to a designated collection spot outside on collection day.
Here to help everyone sort their burnables from their recyclables, and everything in between, is Japanese garbage man and entertainer Shuichi Takizawa, who’s garnered a large following online by sharing incredibly useful insider hacks and tips.
His latest hack involving what to do with used pizza boxes has recently gone viral, so let’s take a look at what he recommends we do with the bulky boxes.
Takizawa’s tweet, written in English, is in response to him often finding used pizza boxes put out with the recycling, alongside regular cardboard.
With Takizawa reminding us all that pizza boxes can’t be recycled as they’re stained with cooking oil, what are we meant to do with them once we’ve finished eating our pizza? Pizza boxes are large, and you can accumulate quite a few of them after you’ve had friends around, so they’ll likely be taking up precious space inside your home, seeing as you have to keep your trash inside until collection day in Japan.
Takizawa has a useful hack to help us out, saying there’s an easy way to discard of the boxes without having them take up room in your house until trash day.
That’s right — Takizawa suggests soaking your box in water so you can crumple it up into a ball that’s much smaller and more manageable than a bulky box.
Domino’s Japan even came out endorsing Mr Takizawa’s advice, releasing this video showing how the method allows you to condense three boxes into three easy-to-manage balls that fit into the palm of your hand.
Could this really be the answer to all our bulky box dilemmas? Our Japanese-language reporter Mr Sato decided to find out by trying the method for himself, and sharing the results with us all.
After placing three boxes in the sink and dousing them with water until they were soft and fully soaked, Mr Sato folded each box over and over again to make them as small as possible. They weren’t quite ball-shaped like the ones he’d seen in the videos online, but they were much smaller than they used to be.
▼ Then he squeezed all the water out of them, and placed them on his balcony to dry overnight.
In the morning, the pizza boxes were still as small as he’d left them, and he could now fit all three of them in the palm of his hand!
The hack worked just as well as it did in the videos, and Mr Sato was incredibly impressed by the magical shrinking ability of the boxes. You’ll want to be careful to dry them overnight in a well-ventilated area, or in a sunny spot during the day if it’s cold or wet at night, but if you follow these steps, you too, can become a pizza-shrinking pro!
If you’re looking for another tip to help you deal with your trash, don’t forget to keep particularly pungent items like banana peels in the freezer until collection day. Or you can invest in a trash can that freezes your garbage for you.
Photos ©SoraNews24
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[ Read in Japanese ]