alt Hacker NewsEven better to provide a source for each statistic.
Japan has about half the plastic waste rate, yes [1].
However, the top recycling search result claims Japan only has a 19% recycling rate compared to the US’s 24% [2], but you might have been referring to a specific recycling type?
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/plastic-waste-per-capita
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_rates_by_country
You're greatly misunderstanding that second link: that's the breakdown of what happens to collected municipal waste within each country (notice they all add up to 100% for each country). That says nothing about total amounts of plastic waste collected or recycled.
See Table 1 here and its sources:
https://circulareconomy.earth/publications/how-japan-is-usin...
Japan recycles about 24% of its used consumer plastics into new products, while the US recycles about 8%. That's NOT factoring in thermal recycling, which Japan is far better at than the US.