The Good News: Japan Gives Trash a Second Chance

With a barely audible whoosh, the large doors at the entrance open to a spacious glass-walled hall filled with lush green plants and the soothing sound of a trickling miniature waterfall. But the sleek municipal building in Machida, a bustling city in central Japan, is not a pristine botanical garden. The enticing entrance is merely the facade of a $65 million facility built to handle a dirty job: recycling the wastes of the city's 340,000 residents. "We collect roughly 100,000 tons of garbage a year and convert it back into valuable materials," says a smiling Kenichi Usui, a city waste-management official. He has good reason to be boastful. Japan, which is fast becoming the world's premier industrial power, is also in the forefront of effective waste management.

The country has made "waste not, want not" a national policy. Last year 50% of Japan's wastepaper, 55% of its glass bottles and 66% of its beverage and food cans were recycled. Much of the remaining trash was turned into fertilizers, fuel gases and recycled metals.

& Behind the success are Japan's recycling technology and systematic garbage collection. The Machida plant can deal with almost any category of recyclable refuse: burnables, nonburnables, bottles, cans, durables such as furniture and refrigerators, and "harmfuls" like batteries. Depending on their category, the castoffs are filtered, burned, crushed or otherwise treated on their way to becoming reusable materials. Steel scrap is separated from other garbage by huge magnets. Much of the recycling is computer-controlled: only 45 people work in shifts to run the round-the-clock operation.

Prudent waste management would not be possible without the disciplined cooperation of the Japanese people. Before putting out their garbage, they religiously follow such requirements as separating bottles from cans and burnables like paper from nonburnables such as glass and hard plastic. People who want quick disposal of old refrigerators or TV sets need only make a phone call to the sanitation department for a special pickup. Observes Yumimaru Nakada, a senior official in Tokyo's public sanitation bureau: "Living in a crowded situation, the Japanese have come to learn that garbage recycling is no laughing matter."

And it certainly pays to recycle. From 100,000 tons of typical Japanese garbage comes enough wood pulp to make a roll of toilet paper that would wrap around the earth ten times.