Japan faces the problem of waste disposal

The total volume of discarded waste in Japan is continuously on the rise. In fiscal year 2000, households in Japan produced some 52 million tons of waste, or an average of 1132 grams per person per day. In order to cut down this ever-increasing massive amount of household waste, the government first enacted a law promoting recycling of containers and packages, which came into force in 2000. Since then, the scope of recycling has expanded further with the enactment of Household Electric Appliances Recycling law in April 2001, which makes the recycling of household electrical appliances mandatory. Subsequently, a number of other related laws, like the Food Recycling Law of 2001 and the Automobile Recycling Law that came into effect in April this year, are also aiming at curtailing the volume of waste that the country produces every year.

In addition to household waste, Japan also generates approximately 400 million metric tons of solid industrial waste annually, of which close to 80 million metric tons ultimately find their way to landfills. About 80 percent of the industrial waste produced in fiscal 1996 was sludge, animal waste, and remains of construction sights or demolition materials. Reclaimed land around the seacoasts in different parts of the country has until now provided ideal sights for easy disposal of a large chunk of such industrial waste. But as the country has a small land area, there is little room for disposal sites to handle the growing volume of solid waste.

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The current reserve of landfills for industrial waste in Japan is estimated to be around 3 years. As a result, the cost of waste disposal is continuously on the rise, which on the other hand is crating a new problem in the form of illegal dumping of such waste. The issue has become a matter of serious concern, both for the corporate world of Japan as well as for the society as a whole.

It has been revealed last week by Japan's Environment Ministry that as of April 2003 more than 11 million cubic meters of industrial waste, enough to fill the huge Tokyo Dome baseball stadium for as many as nine times, had illegally been dumped at more than 2,500 sites nationwide. About 80 percent of the total amount is to stay at sites where they are dumped, as the ministry has no cleanup plans.

This is for the first time that the ministry has conducted a nationwide survey on illegally dumped industrial waste in country's all 47 prefectures. Of the total volume of such waste, almost half comes from construction. Tokyo's adjacent Chiba prefecture heads the list of illegally dumped waste with a combined volume of 3.9 million cubic meters in 877 dumpsites. The amount is almost a third of the national total. Fukui and Mie prefectures of the Kinki region of central Japan follow Chiba.

Most of the sites where illegal waste is being dumped are relatively smaller in size. As large scale dumping getting harder due to stricter rules and regulations, it is being replaced with smaller-lot, which observers term as guerilla-like dumping operations. The Ministry of Environment survey cites lax enforcement by local authorities behind the pileup. As both central and local governments in Japan are trying to find out ways to counter this rising trend of illegal dumping of industrial waste, the volume of other waste materials are also on the increase.

It has already been mentioned that Japan produces more than 50 million tons of household and general waste every year. Of this, around 20 million tons consists of food waste. This is 6 times the weight of used-newspapers and 4 times that of discarded automobiles.

Facing with this problem of massive wastage of food items, the government of Japan has enacted the Food Recycling Law in June last year, which aims to reduce the amount of food waste generated by food manufacturers and restaurants. The law also promotes the reuse of food waste such as by turning the waste materials into livestock feed and compost.

With the law in force, food producers and outlets are trying hard to reduce the waste generated at their respective points. While food waste from the processing and manufacturing stage has been partially successful in recycling the waste, the other end of the food sector is yet to make a breakthrough.

While 48 percent of food waste from the processors and manufacturers are now being recycled, most of the waste from the distribution side are still incinerated or sent to landfills. This includes leftovers at numerous restaurants around the country, as well as unsold food at supermarkets and lunch boxes and packed or canned items that have passed the expiration date at convenience stores.

As the society gets affluent, huge amount of food items increasingly find their way to waste disposal sites. The trend is disturbingly marked at the backdrop of food shortages in different parts of the world. And Japan is not alone in this regard, as the trend is also on the rise almost in all advanced societies. But the good thing for Japan is that, policymakers are now realizing the hard fact of the difficulties of waste management. As landfill sites are being threatened to overflow, and as concern about country's self-sufficiency rates for food grows, new legislations keep making their way to control the unchecked growth of sheer wastage of food items.