[first person] "Back then, medical waste was gold: the frenzy and confusion I saw in the waste industry" - 1994.

[first person] "Back then, medical waste was gold: the frenzy and confusion I saw in the waste industry" - 1994.

(Noboru Watanabe, National Federation of Industrial Waste Management Associations, Medical Waste Specialist Group)

To be honest, back then, medical waste was a "new vein of gold.
I have been in the waste industry for a long time, and in the past, waste disposal was almost like volunteering. It was cheap or free. I used to be asked to take it away for free. However, the trend changed after the Ministry of Health and Welfare issued "Guidelines for Medical Waste Disposal" in 1989.

Needles, tubes, and gauze with blood on them. These items were named "infectious waste," and strict management and disposal were required. What happened as a result?
The unit cost of disposal jumped dramatically. It was more than 10 times higher than before.
The cost of treatment, which until then had been about 50 yen per kilogram, was now said to be as high as 1,000 yen per kilogram.

What happens when this happens? People flocked to the industry.
Real estate, construction, and even cab companies, all of which had never dealt with garbage before, entered the "infectious business" one after another.
Some were driving trucks with incinerators, others were using bar codes to manage garbage, and even the big companies like NEC and Fujitsu were serious about this.

At the time, I was in charge of a technical committee of an industry group that was working hard to establish rules for proper disposal, but secretly I thought, "This is going to be rough. Sure enough, as I thought.
The dumping began.
Next to a company that charges 1,000 yen per kilo, there would be a vendor who would do it for 50 yen. Where do they make up the difference?　Cutting corners in processing. It makes no sense to burn garbage in the same way as before the law was revised. In the worst cases, there was even illegal dumping.

I don't know what the law was revised for.
We tried to raise the standard in the industry by creating "voluntary standards," but the field is not going to change that easily. The desire to "make money from garbage" came first.

But, I think.
I think that this country is putting too much expectation on "market creation through laws and regulations.
Rules to protect the environment have somehow turned into business opportunities. Medical waste was a symbol of this.

I am not the kind of person who is happy to see the price of garbage go up.
What is really needed is for the waste to be disposed of in accordance with the rules and to protect human life and health. I think it's only right that the cost should be commensurate with that.

However, in the frenzy of those days, many people were lured by the "smell of money.
As someone who was in the industry, I will never forget that.