World’s second biggest producer of plastic waste per capita vows to put its plastic mountain on map at summit

One of the joys of traveling on Japan’s bullet trains is tucking into an ekiben “station bento”. But it is also a reminder of the country’s addiction to plastic.

The Guardian’s ekiben, eaten en route to this week’s G20 summit in Osaka, contained no fewer than nine individual pieces of plastic, from functional sachets for sauce and mustard to purely decorative slivers of fake grass.

Why the sudden focus on plastics?

The proportion of plastic bags among plastic waste is not big, but charging would be symbolic