If extreme global warming is the headline-making environmental disaster on the world's horizon, then waste disposal is its ugly domestic step-sister that's already here.
Japan has a garbage problem of mountainous proportions. However, until recent years, the menace has been given scant attention.
In Japan, there's no getting away from it. The nation produces almost 460 million tons of waste annually. Imagine, if you will, 1,100 Tokyo Domes packed with the stuff. Just over a tenth of this is municipal trash; the remainder is industrial waste. Only France (and possibly the United States, for which data is incomplete) produced more garbage than Japan in 1999, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
In 1999, official estimates indicated that there were just 2.6 years' worth of industrial landfill space left. Adding to the urgency has been a jump in illegal dumping and a decline in communities willing to host landfills.
The government has finally been spurred to address the issue, but there is more to the matter than simply the logistics of where to put rubbish. Waste disposal involves weighty issues related to human health, the environment and the economy.
Dioxins spewed from waste incinerators climb up the food chain and on to our tables or seep into ground water. Wetlands and valleys are lost under mountains of trash. Waste also contributes to climate change, accounting for at least 2 percent of the country's carbon dioxide emissions.
Waste disposal is expensive -- it costs about 60,000 yen to process a ton of waste from central Tokyo. Municipalities throughout Japan spent almost 2.7 trillion yen on disposal in 1998.
In a bid to keep the nation from wasting away, the government is in the process of enacting long-overdue recycling legislation.
Recycling laws have been put into effect for food, cardboard, plastic, glass, paper, most beverage containers and home appliances. Similar laws for construction materials and automobiles will be enacted next year. All these fall under the Basic Law for Establishing a Recycling-based Society, passed in May 2000. This law also sets priorities for waste disposal: reduce, reuse, recycle and, when necessary, dispose.
Once these laws are in effect, they will cover more than a quarter of the trash produced annually, estimates Kentaro Doi of the Environment Ministry's recycling promotion office.
"Most of the things we do not have recycling laws for are things that are difficult to recycle," he said, "like sludge [from water treatment plants] and waste from farm animals."
Recycling rates for aluminum, steel and glass -- all hovering around 80 percent in 2000 -- are at the high end of the spectrum. Yet while recycling of PET bottles has ballooned -- from less than 0.5 percent in 1993 to over 34 percent in 1999 -- production has outpaced recycling every year except 2000.
Skeptics worry that while the government's policy is sound in theory -- putting a premium on trimming consumption and reusing products -- in practice, recycling ends up taking precedence. Consumers groups and pundits argue that Japan's recycling laws force citizens and municipalities to shoulder the bulk of the financial burden, leaving manufacturers little incentive to create more environmentally benign products.
Lawyer and environment activist Hiroshi Iguchi puts it this way: "There is no mechanism in the basic recycling law to see that we reduce consumption of resources and energy. Essentially, there is nothing there to alter our mass consumption of resources."
Iguchi believes that while recycling has its place, it is not enough. He contends that the new law will take what until now has been a vicious cycle of mass production, mass consumption and mass disposal and simply tack on a mass recycling dimension.
Iguchi and others are quick to point out that recycling is no panacea. It, too, uses energy and costs money. To recycle a plastic bottle it takes nearly four times the 40 grams of oil needed to produce it.
Japan's waste problem is one of quantity and quality. Not only does Japan have more garbage than it knows what to do with, most waste does not break down easily.
The average modern Tokyoite produces a little over 1 kg of waste daily, or around 400 kg annually -- about the weight of two well-fed sumo wrestlers. That figure is nearly four times more than that of the average Japanese citizen in 1912. Many waste-disposal pundits point out that before the influx of Western influences, Japan was the epitome of sustainability: a closed economy that used resources efficiently and within the bounds of the environment's ability to absorb them.
The history of its urban garbage, however, goes back at least four centuries. It started with the influx of people into Edo (current-day Tokyo) after Tokugawa Ieyasu established the shogunate there in 1603. Plagued by rubbish thrown onto riverbanks and into the city's rivers and ditches, the shogunate designated garbage men and disposal sites -- such as at the mouth of the Sumida River. Garbage from the city's northern half was collected on the second day of each month, and from the southern half the next day. After items of value were removed, the rest was dumped into landfills.
Back then, though, thrift was a virtue. "Things were used until they could be used no more," said Saburo Kato, a former bureaucrat who retired to start a small environmental nongovernmental organization. Yukata were worn until they were only fit for pajamas. After that, they became diapers and finally cleaning rags.
Another crucial difference is that Edo's waste was biodegradable. Raw garbage and human waste became fertilizer, while razed buildings became kindling. Repairmen also made the rounds, mending ceramic pots and geta sandals. The Edo equivalent of "recycle shops" abounded.
Then, with the advent of industrialization over the Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras, came modern waste problems. Faced with diseases and pests that thrived on the burgeoning waste, the nation embraced incineration. Today, nearly 78 percent of all garbage is burned to minimize the volume of landfill-destined garbage and to make the most of limited dump space -- despite incineration being the leading source of dioxins.
Consequently, Kato and others question the efficiency of incineration-intensive solutions. The key to solving the garbage problem, they suggest, might not lie in new laws or waste-processing technologies. Instead, a peek into the past might be what is needed to foster a less wasteful future.