Mainichi Daily News

Monday, October 4, 1999

Cutting dioxin levels

Mainichi Shimbun

The government last week set a target to reduce the volume of
waste that is put in landfills. The decision is based on a Cabinet
committee guideline issued in March and aims to slash dioxin emissions to a tenth of present levels within four years.

About 90 percent of the dioxin released into the atmosphere is
the result of waste incineration. From this, it is clear that
curbing dioxin emissions requires cutting down how much waste is generated.
The recent government decision was intended as a blueprint to
achieve such a reduction.

It sets numerical targets and merits praise on that point. But
the numbers appear at a glance to have been arbitrarily assigned.
For instance, it calls for the volume of both general waste (items
discarded by households and offices) and industrial waste (from factories and construction sites) to be halved by fiscal 2010 and for higher ratios of waste to be recycled.

The plan is ambitious and appears to answer our needs, but a
closer look reveals some puzzling arithmetic. It does not actually
call for individual households and businesses to throw away less. It
only encourages further waste treatment to halve the volume of waste
that is taken to landfills. Curiously, the plan expects the overall volume of waste generated to rise. While it foresees household waste declining from 53 million tons at present to 50 million tons by 2010 - assuming the economy continues to grow at 2 percent annually - it expects industrial
waste to grow from 426 million tons to 480 million tons, even if efforts
are made to limit discharges.

If we liken waste disposal to a river, then the plan
essentially sees the flow from its upstream sources increase but by somehow choking off the midstream flow, it seeks to reduce water levels downstream by half. To drastically slash dioxin levels, moreover,
incineration is to be curbed by 22 percent for industrial waste and 15 percent for general waste. Are we expected to believe that waste treatment can make tons of garbage disappear into thin air?

The equation would have be more realistic if it had called for
people to discard less. The Cabinet committee that proposed the plan
should have been well aware of this. So why was the government unable
to come up with a strategy to reduce the influx from
"tributaries"?
The culprit is a fundamental flaw in the nation's waste
management administration. Under the existing legal framework, all items discarded by households and factories are regarded as waste destined to be disposed of at landfills after compression and incineration. Of discarded items, only those that can be sold are seen as
resources.Thanks to technological advances, the massive volumes of sludge that are generated at construction sites can be dehydrated on-site
and converted into building materials. Sadly, though, such
materials have few buyers and are often disposed of along with other waste rather than being recycled.

The government decision will come under review in 2005. Considering that existing landfills have only enough room to
absorb trash for just a few more years, we cannot wait that long. We
hope that the government will rethink its plan prior to that date
and introduce new legislation to establish reduction targets for
the amount of waste generated at the source.

From the Mainichi Shimbun, Sept. 29, 1999