Nowhere to dump, landfill fight takes lid off Japan's garbage crisis

By GARY SCHAEFER The Associated Press 12/8/00 1:27 PM

TOKYO (AP) -- Japan, renowned worldwide for the tidiness of its cities, is awash in garbage.

Disposal sites are overflowing. Illegal dumping is on the rise. Unscrupulous entrepreneurs are shipping toxic waste overseas. Greenpeace has dubbed Tokyo the dioxin capital of the world.

Alarmed by an ever-increasing volume of trash and the rapidly vanishing space available to dispose of it, Japanese sanitation officials say this country could eventually drown in its own waste.

"In 30 years there won't be any place left in this city for garbage, no matter how much we burn," said Hideo Minaba, a spokesman for Tokyo's sanitation department.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average person in this country produces about 2.4 pounds of trash a day -- about half of what Americans toss out and about the same as green-minded Germans.

The problem is a lack of space. Much of Japan is too mountainous for habitation, and the plains and coasts where most of the 120 million Japanese live are already notoriously crowded.

To save room, the country burns most of its garbage -- about 75 percent compared to about 20 percent in the United States and Germany. Tokyo alone has 17 factory-sized incinerators burning trash around the clock.

Even so, available disposal space shrank by about a fifth in the last decade. And while most Japanese understand the need for new dumps, nobody wants one next door.

In Hinode, a small community in the hilly outskirts of western Tokyo, riot police had to be deployed recently to enforce a court order expropriating a small grove of cypress trees to make way for the expansion of a 45-acre dump.

The property had been purchased by residents worried the site was polluting their air and water with dioxins -- cancer-linked substances generated in the incineration process.

The operator of the Hinode dump contends it is safe, but disclosed environmental data only after a long legal skirmish.

"Nobody really understands the risks," said Shinichi Hashimoto, an environmental activist. "Who's going to take responsibility when the unthinkable happens?"

Sanitation officials insist they have cleaned up their act since the 1970s, when a public outcry forced the Japanese government into getting tough on industrial polluters.

"Car exhaust is more harmful than the emissions from a place like this," said Keizo Maejima, who runs a gleaming new waterfront incineration facility in Tokyo that displays pollution levels on an electronic panel outside.

But such facilities are vastly outnumbered by thousands more older, often unlicensed, private trash incinerators that foul the atmosphere.

And an increasing amount of garbage that is not burned or buried is being shipped overseas -- an illegal, but cheaper, solution.

In the most glaring example, the president of a commercial waste-removal service was arrested in May for shipping 2,000 tons of used syringes and soiled diapers to the Philippines in containers marked "paper for recycling."

The garbage dilemma has prompted some areas to take emergency measures.

In October, the Tokyo suburb of Hino eliminated neighborhood trash bins and required homeowners to use officially approved trash bags selling for the hefty price of 80 cents each.

A month later it announced that the volume of trash had been halved.

But the city's recycling manager cautioned that it was still too early to say whether the initiative would permanently change residents' habits. Some had already found a way around buying trash bags by simply dumping garbage from home in trash cans outside their nearest convenience store.

Tokyo's sanitation department, meanwhile, has started melting down the ash now left over after garbage is burned. The operator of the Hinode dump wants to use it to make cement.

But experts say that's just sweeping dirt under the carpet.

Atsuhiro Honda, who has spent the last 52 years researching sanitation policy, argues the only solution is to discourage people from generating waste in the first place. He believes manufacturers should be required to take back their products for disposal -- a measure he says would force them to "build in" reusability.

"In the United States you've got plenty of space where garbage can be simply thrown away with relatively few risks," he said. "What we're doing in Japan just isn't sustainable."

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), December 08, 2000