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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