Appliances Carried Across the Darkness -- End-of-Life Equipment and the Environmental Price (September 2006)

Appliances Carried Across the Darkness -- End-of-Life Equipment and the Environmental Price (September 2006)

In 2006, five years had passed since Japan's Home Appliance Recycling Law went into effect, and efforts were underway to create a recycling-oriented society. However, behind the scenes, the phenomenon of used home appliances being illegally exported to Asian countries as "used goods" has been spreading, exploiting gaps in the system. Rather than being reused locally, these appliances were being dismantled and incinerated in a crude manner, polluting the soil, water, and air with toxic substances and having a serious impact on the ecosystem.

In the Philippines, Vietnam, and southern China, TV sets and refrigerators sent from Japan were destroyed outdoors, dripping lead, mercury, and cadmium. Freon contained in the cooling systems was also not recovered and released into the atmosphere. This was not only environmental pollution, but also adversely affected the health of the workers.

Domestically, there was no system in place to stop such exports, and the line between "waste" and "used goods" was blurred, with customs and the Ministry of the Environment taking a back seat. There were shades of gray in the monitoring system at each port, and numerous loopholes existed. On the surface, the recycling rate appeared to be improving, but in reality, the environmental burden was being transferred overseas.

This problem symbolizes the limitations of Japan's environmental policy in the 2000s. The reality is that nature and people in other countries are sacrificed behind domestic cost avoidance - a dark export that goes against the name of "environmentally advanced country.