Shinjuku-ku garbage sorting: the five-category guide

You moved in on a Wednesday. The unit was clean, the wifi was on, the operator left a bottle of water on the counter. The first thing you needed to know on Thursday morning was which bag goes out, and at what time.

The trash room is by the elevator on the ground floor. The sign on the door has five lines in Japanese, each with a day of the week. The bin in your kitchen is half full of yogurt cups and a chicken tray from the konbini. You do not yet know which bin those belong in. The clock says 7:42 a.m.

This is the moment the welcome packet doesn't quite cover.

The rule that decides everything

Out by 8 a.m. on the designated day. Not the night before. The night-before move is the foreigner-trap version of trash etiquette in Tokyo; the actual rule is that the bag leaves your unit on the morning of collection.

The reason is crows and cats. A Shinjuku block in summer has both. A bag left curbside at 11 p.m. is shredded by 5 a.m. and spread across the sidewalk by 6:30, which the building manager finds before the truck does. The 8 a.m. window is short on purpose. The truck arrives anytime between 8 a.m. and noon; if you missed the window, the bag goes back to your unit until next pickup.

Collection runs in rain and on national holidays. The only days it pauses are the year-end / New Year window (roughly 12/30 to 1/3) and the rare day with a severe storm warning. The 集積所 (shūsekisho — trash room or curbside collection point) opens at the hour the building manager posts, usually 6 a.m. Photograph that sign on day one. The kanji rows match the categories below.

What goes in which bag

Shinjuku-ku sorts household waste into five working categories, plus two specialty drop-offs. The five are the ones you produce every week. None of them require a ward-issued bag. A transparent or semi-transparent plastic bag is the rule, the same kind every supermarket gives you for free with a frozen item.

燃やすごみ (moyasu gomi — combustible garbage). Twice a week. Kitchen scraps, food-soiled paper, used tissues, cotton swabs, bento containers with food residue, disposable diapers, paper that's too small or too dirty to recycle, rubber and leather, small amounts of garden plants cut into pieces 50 cm or shorter. Drain water out of food scraps before bagging. Soak waste cooking oil into paper or harden it with a coagulant; do not pour it in. This is 70 percent of what you produce.

資源プラスチック (shigen purasuchikku — recyclable plastic). Once a week. Two sub-types, same bag: plastic containers and packaging (yogurt cups, bento trays, snack wrappers, the plastic film on a sandwich, shampoo bottles, the plastic cap off your PET bottle), and pure plastic products under 30 cm in any dimension and thinner than 5 mm (toothbrushes, plastic hangers, small toys, rulers). Rinse anything with food residue. Cups, films, and trays go in the same bag together. Items that won't come clean go in moyasu gomi instead. Do not mix in lighters or rechargeable batteries; they cause truck fires.

びん・缶・ペットボトル (bin, kan, petto botoru — bottles, cans, PET bottles). Once a week, in the same bag or container. Drink and food cans (aluminum or steel, rinsed), glass bottles for food and drink (rinsed), PET bottles (rinsed; cap off and label peeled; the cap goes in the recyclable plastic bag from the previous category). Bottles that won't rinse clean (cooking-oil bottles, the soy sauce one that crusted) go in metal/ceramic/glass instead.

古紙 (koshi — recyclable paper). Once a week. Newspapers folded into quarters, magazines, books, notebooks, flyers, envelopes, toilet roll cores, flat-pack delivery cardboard. Bind it with string by type, or use a paper bag for the miscellaneous small stuff. Collected even in the rain.

金属・陶器・ガラスごみ (kinzoku, tōki, garasu gomi — metal, ceramic, glass garbage). Twice a month. Broken plates and cups, frying pans you've worn through, small metal scraps, light bulbs, mercury thermometers, dirty glass bottles that refused to rinse. The two pickup dates fall on the 1st and 3rd or the 2nd and 4th of the chosen weekday. Never the 5th. Most stays produce one bag of this in a month, or none at all. Wrap broken glass and ceramic in thick paper and write キケン (kiken — dangerous) on the outside in marker so the collector doesn't cut a hand.

The two specialty drop-offs run on the same days as bottles and cans, but in their own labeled containers:

• スプレー缶・カセットボンベ・乾電池 (spray cans, cassette gas cylinders, dry-cell batteries). Empty the cans as much as possible before disposal. Tape over the positive and negative terminals on every battery. Japanese fire codes treat this as load-bearing, not paranoid.
• Small rechargeable batteries. Phone batteries, e-cigarette batteries, anything labeled Li-ion. These never go in the household bag. Drop them at the waste collection office, a participating electronics store, or the recycling box in a larger Bic Camera. A swollen battery goes straight to the Waste Collection Office, taped and bagged separately.

The Yotsuya block, by way of example

Pickup days vary by chome and sometimes by banchi (the block-level number inside a chome). The pattern repeats across all of Shinjuku-ku: combustible twice a week, recyclables once a week, metal/ceramic/glass twice a month. Your building's posted sign is the artifact that decides. The chome-by-chome master list lives in the back of the ward's English PDF.

To make this real, the schedule for Yotsuya 4-chome runs like this. The block at 1, 4-7, and 25-32 banchi puts out combustible on Tuesday and Friday, recyclables on Wednesday, metal/ceramic/glass on the 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month. A half-block over at 2, 3, 8-24 banchi, the combustible days slide one weekday (Wednesday and Saturday), and the recyclables move to Thursday. A reader on Yotsuya 1-chome runs a third schedule again. Wakaba 1 to 3 chome, two streets south, runs Wednesday combustible / Tuesday and Friday plastics. Kabukicho 1 and 2 chome are marked with an asterisk in the ward table and run a custom schedule; you call the Kabukicho Waste Collection Center on 03-3200-5339 for the specifics.

The point of naming this many days is that the ward's PDF and your building sign are the only sources that resolve your block. The Tokyo Cheapo guide does not. The Reddit post you found does not. The unit's previous tenant maybe wrote it down on a sticky note. Photograph the sign on the trash-room door on day one and name the photo "trash" in your phone. Cross-reference once with the ward PDF the operator left in the welcome packet. After that, you check the photo on Sunday night and you set one phone alarm.

The things the bag pretends to know

Three items confuse almost every new resident, and the answer is in the official guide but not in the welcome packet.

The plastic bottle and its cap. The bottle goes in the bottles-and-cans bag, rinsed, label peeled. The cap goes in the recyclable plastic bag. Two different bags, two different days. The label is paper-and-plastic-mixed; tear it off and put it in the recyclable plastic bag as well. Konbini staff at a 7-Eleven inside Shinjuku station will do this for you if you toss the bottle in their bin; the lobby bins at your building won't.

The chopsticks. Disposable wooden chopsticks go in combustible. They are wood and food-soiled; the bag wants them. Reusable plastic chopsticks under 30 cm go in recyclable plastic if they wash clean. The pair you keep meaning to throw out from a half-finished cup of ramen go in moyasu gomi; the food residue decides.

The light bulb. Filament and LED bulbs go in metal/ceramic/glass, on one of the two-a-month days. Place the bulb back in the small box it came in, or wrap it in thick paper or cardboard. Fluorescent tubes and mercury thermometers go in their own transparent bag, separate from the metal-ceramic-glass bag, and the bag is labeled in Japanese with 水銀 (suigin — mercury). Most furnished units use LEDs and you won't change a bulb in a 90-day stay. If you do, the operator usually replaces it, not you.

The other small confusions resolve quickly. Aluminum foil with food on it is combustible, not metal. A pizza box with grease is combustible, not paper. A Ziploc bag that's clean is recyclable plastic; one with food residue is combustible. The cleanliness test is the one that decides between recyclable plastic and combustible most often.

When something is bigger than 30 cm

The bookshelf you bought used at Off-House on day three, the rolling suitcase that finally cracked at the wheel, the air purifier the operator left in the closet. Anything longer than 30 cm in any dimension is 粗大ごみ (sodai gomi — bulky waste). It does not go in any of the five bags above. The ward charges a fee, you reserve a pickup date, and you buy a sticker.

The reservation runs through the Large Sized Waste Reception Center. You call 03-5304-8080 between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m., Monday to Saturday (closed New Year), or you book online at shinjuku-sodai.com at any hour. The English line on the phone is limited; the website has a Japanese form a phone translator handles well. The site asks for your address, the item type, and a preferred date. The date is usually 7 to 14 days out.

After booking, you buy a 有料粗大ごみ処理券 (yūryō sodai gomi shori-ken — paid bulky-waste disposal sticker) at any Shinjuku konbini, a Y'es or Family Mart that displays the ticket sign, the ward office on the 7th floor, or one of the three waste collection centers. Stickers are sold in ¥200 and ¥400 denominations. A folding chair costs ¥400. A bookshelf, ¥800 to ¥1,200. A futon mattress, ¥400 to ¥1,200 depending on size. You write your booking number on the sticker, stick it on the item, and place the item curbside before 8 a.m. on the booked date. The truck takes it without your supervision.

Appliances (air conditioners, TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, clothes dryers) are not sodai gomi. They run through the Home Appliance Recycling Law and the retailer who sold the appliance. For a furnished tenant, this is the operator's problem, not yours.

When you put the wrong thing in the bag

The collector leaves the bag. They do not knock and they do not call the manager. They peel a small sticker onto the side of the bag explaining which category was wrong. The sticker is in Japanese; the marked checkbox tells you the call, and a translator app reads it in five seconds. You carry the bag back into your unit, re-sort it, and put it out next pickup.

If the building manager intercepts a wrong bag before the truck arrives, they post a generic notice in the elevator the next morning. The notice does not name you. The Shinjuku-ku building managers I have met treat this as a teaching round, not a punishment round; they have seen the sequence many times. The neighbor in 401 has also gotten the sticker. So has the neighbor in 503. So have I.

If you get a polite note from a neighbor (a piece of paper on your door, two lines in Japanese), read it on the translator and re-sort the bag. There is no further escalation past the note. You do not need to write back. The next correctly sorted bag closes the loop.

The recovery rule is the same in every Tokyo building. Re-sort, wait, put it out next pickup. No shame, no scorn. The operator, the building manager, and the truck collector have all run this play before.

Reading the sign on the door

The trash-room sign uses about a dozen kanji you can decode in 60 seconds and keep on your phone forever.

• Days: 月 (getsu — Monday), 火 (ka — Tuesday), 水 (sui — Wednesday), 木 (moku — Thursday), 金 (kin — Friday), 土 (do — Saturday).
• Categories: 燃 (mo — combustible), 古紙 (koshi — paper), プラ (pura — plastic), びん・缶 (bin-kan — bottles and cans), 金属 or 不燃 (kinzoku or funen — metal/ceramic/glass).
• Time: 朝 (asa — morning), 8時 (hachi-ji — 8 o'clock), 6時から8時まで (roku-ji kara hachi-ji made — from 6 to 8).
• Bag rule: 透明 (tōmei — transparent), 半透明 (han-tōmei — semi-transparent), 袋 (fukuro — bag).

Match each row on the sign to one of the categories above. If you cannot read a row, ask the operator's check-in contact within the first three days; they have answered the question for everyone who lived in this unit before you. Most Shinjuku buildings also post a small English supplement next to the Japanese one, photocopied from the ward's PDF.

The shape of the week

By week two you have stopped thinking about the bags. Sunday night, you check the photo on your phone. Monday morning the building hallway smells faintly of cardboard. Tuesday and Friday before 8 a.m. the kitchen bag goes out, replaced the same morning with a fresh transparent bag under the sink. The bottles-and-cans bin in the corner of the kitchen fills up over the week and clears every Wednesday. The yogurt-cup bag and the plastic-tray bag share one container. The metal-ceramic-glass bag stays mostly empty, except for the week you dropped the bowl and bagged the shards in thick paper labeled キケン.

The categories are five, the days are two-plus-one-plus-one-plus-half. The crows lose. The neighbor in 503 nods at you in the elevator. The building manager stops the generic notice for a couple of weeks. The week the sticker shows up on your bag, you re-sort, you wait, you put it out next time. The sequence has been running in this block since the last tenant, and the one before them.

You are part of it now.