As an island nation surrounded by the ocean, Japan’s culture of eating raw fish has been around for a long time. Nowadays, you can eat fresh sashimi anywhere in Japan, but the revolutionary product that allowed this to happen was actually styrofoam. Compared to the wooden boxes and casks used to store fish before, these boxes are far more hygienic and preserve the food for longer.

It costs about 200 yen for one styrofoam container, but a container large enough to hold a whole tuna fish costs 6,000 yen. Styrofoam is made with petroleum, so if oil prices rise, so does the cost of fish. Since these boxes are quite expensive, they’re often recycled, and the machinery in this processing plant allows that to happen.

The first step is to break apart the containers and melt them down, then harden them into a board shape. One box is the equivalent of about 100 styrofoam containers and weighs about 7 kg. What do these boxes become after being recycled? They are usually shipped to China and used for toys, insulating material, or fuel for machinery, creating a natural recycling lifecycle.

Once you exit the building you will find yourself at a bridge, but it suddenly breaks off unnaturally. This bridge used to connect to Yokohama Station, but during the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, it collapsed. The other existing bridge still connects directly to Minato Mirai Station.