Japanese plans to impress world leaders with visions of electric motorways, fuel-cell aircraft and offices with solar panel windows could be upset by the ordinary chopstick and the garish vending machine.

Nearly 20 years after the spectacular neon excesses of the economic bubble, Japan remains a voracious consumer of everything. From elaborately packaged boxes of individually wrapped sweets to streets lined with “disposable” houses, the country's leaders are quietly panicking that efforts to turn the world green will hit their own society the hardest.

When the presidents and prime ministers of the world's richest nations meet in the Windsor Hotel in the lush fields of Hokkaido in two weeks' time, they will be encouraged to view the world through green-tinted spectacles. Last week staff at the Windsor were giving the venue for the summit a hasty “eco-makeover” — a rapid attempt to replace, for example, the many light bulbs in the hotel's chandeliers with low-energy LED versions.

It is Japan's turn to host the G8 leaders' meeting and Tokyo will stop at nothing to push an environmental agenda for the talks.

To put his guests in the right frame of mind Yasuo Fukuda, the Prime Minister, is expected to encourage his counterparts to shed their ties and attend meetings in “cool biz” clothes.Japan seems ideally suited to forcing firm environmental commitments on the G8 leaders. This is, after all, the country, that put the Prius on the road and has pioneered the fuel-cell car. Compared with their international peers, its manufacturing companies are admirably efficient users of energy. The country is an obsessive recycler of its rubbish and has become so good at conserving water that households have been punished with steep price rises.

The reality of daily life, say environmentalists, is rather different.

Japanese society uses about 30 billion plastic bags a year — a quantity of plastic that represents a full day's worth of crude oil imports — and collectively loses tens of thousands of plastic umbrellas on trains every year. The cultural fascination with wrapping and presentation means that an astonishing quantity of padding surrounds many supermarket foods. Shoppers have grown used to the idea of individually wrapped apples.

Japanese people are used to importing from China, unwrapping and then throwing away — on average ten minutes later — 25 billion pairs of disposable wooden chopsticks every year. Most have also grown used to another comfortable fact of Japanese life: that there is at least one vending machine for every 20 people. The machines are, more often than not, illuminated 24 hours a day and most can keep drinks both chilled and warmed to the perfect temperature.

Japan may even have managed to transmit its love of the disposable chopstick — or waribashi — back to China, where the favoured white birch trees are felled. Because Japanese consumers are picky about the quality of their disposable chopsticks, many millions more are produced than are ever actually bought; the surplus is sold to China, where the waribashi habit is spreading.

To the energy conservationist, the Japanese home also appears to squander energy in every room: critics are especially sceptical about the need for kettles that keep the water at near-boiling point throughout the day and electric toilets whose seats remain automatically warmed in readiness for their user.

Towering over this wastage, says a report by Yoshiake Kume, of Nasu University, is the astonishingly short lifespan of Japanese houses, which means that a vast proportion of residential Japan is in a near-constant state of being knocked down and rebuilt. The average British house lasts for 77 years; its Japanese counterpart will be torn down and rebuilt after only 33.

With the G8 summit looming, many conservationists have also begun to question the green credentials of Japan's official policies. Its technology companies have pioneered the world's most efficient solar panels and built the ultra-light materials for the most efficient wind turbines.

The German Government is aiming to meet 45 per cent of the country's energy needs with these technologies by 2030, while Japan has its sights set on a more modest 1.63 per cent by 2014.

“Japan's basic policy stance on renewable energy is ambiguous,” Koichi Kitazawa, president of the Japan Science and Technology Agency, told reporters recently.

Hidefumi Kurasaka, a researcher at Chiba University, has identified a potentially gaping flaw in Japanese energy policy and its insistence on global co-operation on reducing

CO2 emissions. According to his findings — and despite the Government's much-vaunted endorsement of nuclear power — Japan now burns twice the amount of coal that it did ten years ago.

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