Shinjuku garbage sorting: bags, dates and collection

In Shinjuku, household waste needs to reach the collection point by 8 a.m. on the right day. Your building may let you leave it in a storage area the evening before, or it may ask you to keep it in the apartment until morning. Check the building's instructions alongside the ward calendar so you know when and where to put each bag.

Checked 8 September 2026. This guide follows Shinjuku's household collection rules and its 2026 English guide. If your accommodation uses a private waste company, the manager needs to give you that company's instructions.

Read the address before the weekday

The building manager is the person to ask about your collection point and where waste waits before pickup. Those may be different places. Shinjuku's collection-point page also asks new users of an existing point to contact the waste office or center responsible for the area. Ask that office what you need to do before using the point; the ward does not give one joining form that applies everywhere.

Once you know the point, its full address gets you to the right row in the collection-day table. Read the town name and the numbered blocks beside it. A row covering only part of a block, or marked with an asterisk, needs a check with the responsible waste office. The calendar belongs to that point, not to everyone who uses your station.

A saved calendar and a photo of the building sign make a useful pair. Keep the storage hours beside the collection days. Where the ward lends a building recycling containers, its instructions explicitly leave the hours for filling them to the building. The manager or cleaner then puts them at the designated place by 8 a.m. Your evening trip downstairs and their morning trip can be separate parts of the same collection.

Keep recyclables separate on resource day

Resource day comes once a week, so an empty bottle can spend several days in your apartment. Give the different materials their own places while you have space to arrange them. That need not mean a row of large bins. Separate see-through bags can do the job for bottles, cans and PET bottles; buildings with the ward's containers or nets use those instead.

For a PET drink bottle, remove the cap and label, then rinse the bottle. Put the bottle with other PET bottles and its plastic cap and label with recyclable plastic. They go out on the same morning, in separate bags. Separating them as you use them saves sorting through a week's recycling before collection.

Cardboard asks for a different bit of space. Under the ward's paper instructions, you flatten it and tie it together, apart from other paper types such as newspapers and magazines. Remove plastic tape and other non-paper material. In a room with little spare floor, flattening the delivery box when you open it gives that space back sooner than waiting for resource day.

Clean plastic and dirty plastic go in different bags

Empty a yogurt cup and wash or wipe it clean before putting it with recyclable plastic. If it stays heavily soiled, put it with combustible waste, which Shinjuku collects twice a week.

Shinjuku's plastic collection includes qualifying products made entirely from one plastic material as well as packaging. The ward combined them in April 2024. A small all-plastic household item may belong in the same bag as the cleaned cup, but its size and construction still matter.

The English guide excludes hard items whose plastic is 5 mm thick or more, and items over 30 cm in any dimension. For a plastic box, measure its outside length, width and height separately, then the thickness of the plastic itself. Do not add the three dimensions. The Japanese page describes the size boundary as about 30 cm, so ask the waste office about a product right at that size. Metal parts, electrical parts, batteries and lighters also keep an item out of this bag.

A battery needs a separate place

Some things interrupt the weekly routine. A power bank you no longer use may look like another small plastic object, but it needs its own bag. Since April 2025, Shinjuku has collected loose small rechargeable batteries and power banks on resource day. The battery instructions say to tape over the terminals or cable sockets and put only these batteries in a separate see-through bag. Leave the power bank assembled.

A swollen or deformed battery goes to the waste office or a waste collection center instead. Ask the office about safe handling before taking it there. For a battery inside another appliance, follow the appliance instructions; do not pry it out to fit the sorting category.

Save the dates for metal, ceramic and glass

A broken dish stays on a different schedule from the bottles. The metal, ceramic and glass rules require thick paper around sharp or broken items, marked 危険 (kiken — dangerous). Wrap it when it breaks, before it spends time waiting in a bag someone else might move.

This collection happens on the first and third, or second and fourth, occurrence of a weekday each month. There is no fifth-occurrence pickup. A reminder that repeats every two weeks will eventually choose the wrong morning; save the actual dates from your calendar.

That wait matters when you are leaving the apartment. Check your last collection dates before packing, and ask the manager what to do with anything that cannot go out before checkout. Large items have their own paid pickup, booked through the ward's bulky-waste service. Some large appliances are excluded; check the English guide before booking. Anything supplied with a furnished room needs the owner's agreement before disposal.

If the instructions disagree or a bag is left behind

Before the first collection, ask the manager when you can use the storage area and who takes the waste to the collection point. If the building sign and ward calendar disagree, show them both. Recheck holiday notices, and if your bag is left with a notice, read it and ask about anything unclear before the next suitable collection.