ENVIRONMENT-JAPAN: Time to Consume Less, Recycle More

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Mar 19 1998 (IPS) - Each garbage collection day, Minako Katsura brings out two large white bags, filled only with raw and paper waste.

She keeps the other types of waste, including cans, glass and boxed lunch trays or polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, at home until recycling day that comes once a week. As for newspapers, Katsura stacks them neatly and ties them up for the waste collectors to take away once every month.

Katsura is following Tokyo’s garbage laws, which require the segregation of garbage into eight categories to facilitate disposal and recycling of waste. The laws were made in recent years in a desperate bid to control Tokyo’s trash problems.

Tokyo, a city of 12 million people, generates 10 percent of the 50 million tonnes of garbage produced by the country’s household and business sector. This figure does not include industrial waste, of which 367 million tonnes were produced in 1996.

Experts say the statistics that indicate continued yearly increases in waste production are alarming because Japan’s disposal sites are becoming full, and the prospect of building new ones is getting to be more difficult.

“We are full up,” says Naoko Kubota, an official at the Tokyo metropolitan government. “We can only survive by reducing.”

Years of foot-dragging despite warnings from citizens’ movements and experts mean that many of Japan’s large and glittering cities may soon well suffocate in their own garbage.

Tokyo’s biggest trash dump, a man-made, 450,000 sq m island named Dream Island floating serenely on Tokyo Bay, filled up in just eight years. It was put up in 1972.

And starting April, the city will begin dumping trash on another island of litter in Tokyo Bay, called the New Waste Disposal Area. Built at a cost of 3.5 billion U.S. dollars, its area consists of 390,000 sq m.

“Officials estimate the area will serve as a disposal ground for around 15 years. If stringent measures are taken to reduce waste, then probably the site will be available for 30 years. There is nothing more we can do,” explained Kubota.

The building of a second waste island has brought renewed attention to Tokyo’s mounting waste problem, leading to growing calls for consumers and businesses — widely seen as wasteful culprits — to do their bit in reducing garbage in the city.

In April last year, Japan implemented the package recycling law, which was its first attempt at getting businesses to join efforts to recycle steel, glass and plastic containers.

Manufacturers have the option of taking back used products like airconditioners, refrigerators and PET bottles, or paying a fee to a recycling association under the jurisdiction of the Health and Welfare Ministry.

The law is considered a landmark now despite some misgivings that the measure, while encouraging recycling, does not aim at reducing consumption, and in turn, trash.

Kubota says recycling laws, as well as a growing concern among the public, are now showing some favourable results.

For instance, the amount of paper collected in the 23 wards in Tokyo have doubled to 155,000 tons in 1995. Recycling of aluminum and steel cans have also fared well at 77.3 percent.

Recently, four major Japanese automakers announced plans to attain a government-introduced goal of recycling 90 percent of vehicles manufactured between 2000 and 2002.

Various new disposal technology has also been put forward. For example, food manufacturers have set up plans to begin processing raw waste into compost and supplying them to organic farmers.

But experts say there is a need to look beyond what to do with generated waste and review consumption and packaging habits, to reduce trash in the first place. Companies need to produce less wastefully first, before looking at better disposal methods.

“All the recycling and waste reduction efforts will be to no avail if we continue to produce and consume on a massive scale,” contends Ken Morishita, an environmental expert.

There are commercial practices that encourage wasteful consumption. Japanese newspapers point out that manufacturers of televisions do not store spare parts of older models, forcing consumers to buy newer ones instead of having old sets repaired.

Likewise, activists are campaigning to reduce the number of vending machines — there are 5.5 million in Japan, the most in the world — and fast food restaurants that they say encourage the use and high rate of disposal of cans, plastic food containers and paper.

The packaging even of simple items are another sore point with environmentalists. In a society that puts a premium on attractive packing, cookies for instance are packed in individual cellophane packets, then put in a plastic box that is again wrapped in another layer. When purchased, they are put in another paper bag.

It is not surprising, then, that official figures show containers and packages account for 60 percent of garbage volume.