People Dancing with Ash Interests--Autumn, 1994, Medical Waste Disposal Frenzy

People Dancing with Ash Interests--Autumn, 1994, Medical Waste Disposal Frenzy

In Japan at the end of the 1980s, infectious waste from hospitals, such as injection needles and bloodstained gauze, were disposed of as "combined industrial waste" along with general and industrial waste. Accidents involving cleaning workers being stabbed by needles and illegal dumping by hospitals occurred frequently, partly due to hospital management prioritizing cost cutting. In 1989, the Ministry of Health and Welfare established guidelines for the disposal of medical waste in order to curb this dangerous situation, and in 1992, "infectious waste" was legally designated as industrial waste subject to special controls, with sterilization obligations and responsibility imposed on the generator.

The new market for infectious waste treatment suddenly came into the limelight with the establishment of these laws. Annual sales were estimated to be on the order of 30 billion yen, and disposal costs were said to be 10 times higher than for conventional waste. The transformation of waste disposal into a money-making situation has led to a boom in new businesses, with a succession of entrants from different industries.

This enthusiasm was symbolized by Noboru Watanabe, chairman of the Medical Waste Subcommittee of the National Federation of Industrial Waste Management Associations, who said, "This is a new market. After all, this is a new market," he said. Real estate, cab companies, civil engineering companies, and many other industries have entered the market," he said, describing the rush to enter the market as if the first to find it was the winner. But he also warns of the confusion caused by the rapid increase in the number of vendors. That's where the problem happened," he said. The number of suppliers increased beyond what was necessary, which led to dumping competition. The prices for the same waste varied from 50 yen to 1,000 yen per kilogram, depending on the vendor. The cheapest companies will have no choice but to dispose of the waste in the same way as before. We are back to where we were before the law was revised." Despite the serious risk of infectivity, profit-driven price
competition has once again led to the widespread use of dangerous old-fashioned treatment methods on site.

In fact, large companies have entered this market one after another: NEC and Fujitsu have developed management systems that combine barcodes and computers, and Mediport System, jointly established by Itochu Corporation and Watakyu Bedding, aims to thoroughly visualize and manage the treatment process by reading barcodes at three stages: when waste is discharged, when transportation is completed, and immediately before incineration. The company also tried to visualize and thoroughly manage the waste treatment process by reading barcodes at three stages: when the waste is discharged, when transportation is completed, and just before incineration. Also, Nippon Steel Corporation's Kinkibe Kogyo began melting waste in Nagoya City using waste heat from the steelmaking process, and a wave of technological innovation was spreading.

Medium-sized companies and venture businesses also added their ingenuity and ingenuity to the mix. These included Kyowa Kako, which drove a mobile incinerator-equipped processing vehicle; Life Entec, which developed a high-performance incinerator with a tertiary combustion chamber; Tensho Electric Industry and Idemitsu Petrochemical, which produced containers that prevent needles from penetrating and leaking; and Nagamoto, which developed Skyrobo, a machine that crushes used syringes. They were competing with each other in safety and efficiency. In addition, technology companies such as Fuji Electric and Coatac built barcode management and database automatic record-printing systems to help comply with regulations.

On the other hand, however, at the time of 1994, there were more than 1,500 companies licensed to dispose of specially controlled industrial waste, but 90% of them were new entrants with no experience in medical waste disposal. The system's design was exposed as a flawed one, as companies competed on price without sufficient knowledge or ethics, and sloppy treatment once again became widespread. The sense of contradiction and crisis was summed up in Mr. Watanabe's words, "We are going backwards.

The rapid growth and confusion in the medical waste disposal business is not simply the emergence of a new industry, but poses the essential questions of what happens at the intersection of the legal system and the market economy, and how safety and profit can conflict.