Carving a New Cycle in Kagoshima Soil Birth of a Complete Construction Waste Recycling Facility (1994)

Carving a New Cycle in Kagoshima Soil Birth of a Complete Construction Waste Recycling Facility (1994)
In the early 1990s, the amount of construction waste in Kagoshima Prefecture increased rapidly due to an increase in public works projects and residential land development, and illegal dumping and landfill sites were becoming increasingly tight. Under these circumstances, the Kagoshima Recycle Business Cooperative began construction of a facility to completely recycle construction waste materials, a pioneering effort in Japan at the time. Behind this was a policy shift in which the government began to strengthen resource recycling, as evidenced by the 1991 Law for the Promotion of Utilization of Recycled Resources and the 1993 revision of the Waste Disposal and Public Cleansing Law. Conventional treatment of construction waste materials consisted mainly of crushing and landfill, and the recycling rate was low, especially for mixed waste materials of wood and concrete. This facility was equipped with an advanced recycling line that combines crushing, magnetic separation, and s
pecific gravity sorting to recycle the material in the form of wood chips, recycled crushed stone, metal resources, and recycled sand.
Kagoshima Prefecture has the structural problems of a topography with a lot of land development work and a shortage of final disposal sites, and the shift to a recycling-oriented society was a pressing issue for the region. At the time, the prefecture was also experiencing a series of illegal dumping problems, and the development of a joint processing facility was also important in establishing a reliable waste disposal route. In addition, the project was also supported by the fact that the region's own resource recycling market was being formed, including increased demand for recycled crushed stone and the use of wood chips in livestock production. This facility was a symbolic step for Kagoshima Prefecture to move from an era of mass disposal to a recycling-oriented society, and was an inevitable model born from the intersection of the region's industrial structure and environmental policy.