ENVIRONMENT-JAPAN: Tokyo Steps up Recycling Efforts

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Jan 2 2002 (IPS) - Desperate over its mounting garbage problem, Japan is about to embark on a 20-year programme to turn the world’s second largest economy into a recycling society.

Japan, which disposes of 51.2 million tonnes of garbage annually, needs to become a more sustainable and recycling-intensive society, says a government advisory group that is designing the initiative that gets underway this year.

Already, this group has set as a national goal the reduction of waste production to 7.3 million tonnes by 2050, roughly a tenth of the 1996 levels, according to a report the advisors released in December.

In a separate white paper produced in early 2001, the government clearly stated that the more efficient use of resources will not only reap environmental benefits but also bring economic rewards for Japan.

According to available figures, waste reduction and recycling would ultimately boost domestic production by 6 trillion yen (about 46 billion U.S. dollars) beyond business-as-usual projections to 637 trillion yen (about 4.9 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2010.

Garbage sorting and enhanced efforts by producers and consumers to reduce the environmental impact of waste are some of the new measures to be adopted under Japan’s new strategy.

In addition, planners are also pushing for information centres to be set up to promote cooperation toward waste reduction.

“Japan’s recycling has still a ways to go. Efforts are being to change the current mass production and consumption lifestyle to a mass recycling one,” says Kentaro Doi, of the environment ministry’s recycling promotion office.

Japan produces almost 460 million tonnes of waste annually, of which less than a tenth, some 45 million tonnes, is refuse waste. The rest is attributed to industrial waste.

Tokyo alone produces almost four million tonnes a day, according to the government. If this waste output continues unchecked, the refill sites in the capital will be overflowing within the next 30 years.

“The situation is crucial, which is why there is the need to control the behaviour with new laws,” says Doi.

In April last year, following a long debate in the Japanese Diet or Parliament, the government passed a new law that called on manufacturers to be responsible for dismantling and recycling products such as washing machines, television sets and air conditioners.

Starting this year, the government has promised to include cars, computers and microwave ovens in that list. Furthermore, the new law also paves the way for arrests to be made for illegal dumping of home appliances.

Recycling in Japan is by no means a new phenomenon. The environment ministry reports that the recycling of waste into different products, such as turning raw garbage into fertiliser, now accounts for almost 12 percent of total garbage disposed. Recycling rates for aluminum, steel and glass hover around 80 percent.

The recycling of poly ethylene bottles, the clear plastic containers used for drinks and water, has also ballooned, from less than 0.5 percent in 1993 to more than 34 percent in 1999.

But activists want the government to concentrate on reducing production, rather than setting goals for reducing or recycling waste after it has been created.

“There is no mechanism in the basic recycling law to see that we reduce consumption of resources and energy,” says Hiroshi Iguchi, a Japanese lawyer and environmentalist.

He argues that recycling is no panacea to Japan’s rising garbage problem, and that it comes at no small cost. Recycling a plastic bottle takes nearly four times the 40 grammes of oil needed to produce it, Iguchi points out.

Thus, activists say a real solution lies in a more drastic approach to Japan’s garbage problem — changing the Japanese lifestyle and the habit of producing much more waste than is necessary.

Studies conducted by researchers in Germany and Japan reveal a gap in waste reduction practices between the two countries, and show differences in consumer habits.

In Japan, for example, plastic and paper, used typically to wrap both cooked and uncooked food, make up for the most amount of garbage, whereas in Germany, glass bottles are a major component of waste.

However, environmentalists contend that Japan is now ready to adopt better recycling and waste reduction behaviour as a result of a higher public awareness. A national government survey conducted in October last year, for instance, showed more than four in five Japanese were trying to buy products made from recycled materials.

Sixty percent of 3, 476 of people polled replied that they would be willing to pay more for “green” goods, and 56 percent added they were trying to decrease the volume of garbage they throw away and recycle more goods.

Local governments too are throwing their weight behind this move by enacting new laws to consolidate garbage reduction.

The city of Tajimi, in Gifu, central Japan, passed a bill in early December that levies a 500 yen (about four U.S. dollars) tax per tonne of waste delivered from Nagoya, a metropolis which sends its garbage to Tajimi.

The law is expected to be enacted in April, marking the first time a tax is being imposed for garbage disposal with the aim of reducing waste.

This move comes after Nagoya, Japan’s third largest city, was forced to abandon a plan to reclaim a tideland to build a waste dump in 1999. Subsequently, Nagoya adopted a “state of emergency” and developed a new recycling plan in which citizens are forced to separate waste into more than 14 groups prior to disposal.