Sophisticated garbage being used to reclaim Tokyo Bay

Press, 3 May 1984, Page 21

Sophisticated garbage being used to reclaim Tokyo Bay

From

BRUCE ROSCOE

in Tokyo

At 8.30 a.m., 120 helmeted workers of a southern Tokyo waste disposal unit set out in 40 trucks to collect their share of the 9400 tonnes of garbage that will be fed into Tokyo Bay this day, along with about 680 tonnes of ash from rubbish incinerators.

They need to be fit to clear street corners cluttered with television and stereo sets, refrigerators and washing machines — many in good repair but discarded as the whims of sophisticated consumers on the march for new products — and neatly tied vinyl bags of combustible or non-combustible garbage, depending on the day. This week, 3840 other trucks will scour Tokyo streets with clockwork precision for yesterday’s throwaways. The collectors have never been known to strike to any disruptive extent and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government disposal operations for the most part proceed smoothly, from road to truck, and then by truck or barge to the bay. There, problems are mounting. Administrators of the Tokyo Bureau of Public Cleansing are worried, for Tokyo Bay rapidly is nearing the end of its life as a stomach for mountains of waste. Since the creation of “Dream Island,” a one square kilometre tract supporting hot baths, a swimming pool, gymnasium, and playground that was raised out of the sea in 1967 after 10 years of

Ten minutes earlier, the collectors' falling into line like army privates for drill, loosened up in a string of exercises performed to music.

controlled dumping, the speed of other reclamation projects in the bay has outpaced official plans for more sites. By March, 1986 — though bureau officials fear the time will come sooner — a one square kilometre breakwater site will have swallowed its limit of an estimated 12.3 million tonnes of garbage, and by 1991, with the completion of a 4 square kilometre site that is expected to absorb about 50 million tonnes, all sites will be full. After each dumping, spray trucks douse the garbage with disinfectant. In summer months, when high temperatures threaten massive outbreaks of flies, officials send' helicopters up to drench the sites with pest-killing chemicals. Fires sparked by methane gas explosions are common. Protruding further and further into the sea, the expanse of garbage appears to float endlessly in a new configuration of Armageddon. For a singular redeeming attribute, the water wasteland has made space for garbage pulverisation and incineration plants that otherwise would have had to be erected in neighbourhoods. A new incinerator complex, to be built on one bay site in 1986, is designed to draw all its energy from the methane gas that masses below. Public Cleansing Bureau officials admit they never anticipated so much garbage would accumulate so quickly. “We might be able to extend the 1991 deadline a little if people can be persuaded to throw away less, but there are no more

sites,” says Mr Yoshiro Hinata, a disposal administrator. For eight years the officials have run recycling programmes for paper, tins, and bottles, but the volume of waste spared by this effort, at just a few thousand tonnes in total, amounts to no more than a drop in the bay. The bureau now is planning a publicity campaign to discourage needless dumping of still respectable consumer products but is not optimistic that this alone will be sufficient.

The city government’s most formidable obstacle, according to Mr Hinata, is an increasingly affluent urban population. “There is a direct correlation between higher incomes and a higher volume of garbage,” he says. Mr Hinata points to a graph that shows for more than a decade Tokyo’s population has been constant at about 11 million. A steadily climbing curve on the graph, representing higher personal income, is consistently paralleled by a curve indicating the rising amount of waste the bureau has had to collect.

Mr Fumihiko Anai, a writer on

the subject of garbage from time to time, says you need only to inspect others’ want-me-nots to see how well off they are. Tax officials, in their annual crackdown on tax evasion culprits, might be more effective if they examined suspects’ trash cans, Mr Anai believes.

Were they to take Mr Anai’s advice, they could furnish and refurbish thousands of homes.

It is often said that the Japanese word for “repair” is “replace” — a remark that rings true in the absence of any substantial market for second-hand goods, which Japanese customarily tend to despise.

Yet Japanese “care” for the products they discard, carefully wrapping and rewrapping each item as though it were a painfully selected gift Indeed, the multiple wrappings have become a significant part of the rubbish problem. Musashino City, western Tokyo, is using much of its residents’ wastes to satisfy its senior citizens’ wants. It has built a factory where a dozen or so elderly people restore hundreds of near-new items, such as pianos and bicycles, with

generally no more than a little tinkering. Mr Hozumi Tsuyuki, the overseer, says sales of the repaired products bring in enough to run the operation. But efforts such as this, even when added to the sum total of the bureau’s recycling, pulverisation, incineration works, and compost manufacture — five tonnes a day from 50 tonnes of refuse — still fall far short of the volume needed to reduce, meaningfully, Tokyo’s waste output. Come 1991, officials cannot say what will happen. They have tentatively proposed building a new dumping site of about 5 square kilometres off Chiba, just south of Tokyo, but the plan has met with fierce resistance from local residents.

It is even less likely to be accepted now because on some days, depending on which way the wind blows, it would propel offensive smells directly into the faces of about 10 million visitors a year to Tokyo Disneyland — which was built a year ago on land earlier reclaimed from the sea.