An Eye for the Darkness: The Blacklist Illusion of the Industrial Waste Industry, circa 2000

An Eye for the Darkness: The Blacklist Illusion of the Industrial Waste Industry, circa 2000

Around the year 2000, the discrepancy between legal development and actual conditions in the industrial waste treatment industry in Japan reached an extreme level. The Basic Law for Establishing a Sound Material-Cycle Society, the Home Appliance Recycling Law, and the Construction Recycling Law were enacted one after another, and the acquisition of ISO 14001 certification was regarded as proof of a company's social credibility. At the same time, however, the shortage of final disposal sites was becoming more serious, and intermediate treatment facilities were reaching their capacity limits. Waste that could not be accepted by other parties was taken out of regular distribution and became a hotbed for illegal dumping and improper disposal. It was not uncommon for waste that was supposed to have reached the final disposal site to disappear without a trace the next morning.

In the midst of this chaos, corporate environmental officers were constantly on edge. Which contractors could be trusted and who could be hired to avoid scandals? There was little information available to help them make a decision, and some said, "We want a black list of defective contractors so badly we can get our hands on it. In reality, however, the line between good and bad contractors is blurred, and the risk of one's name appearing at an illegal dumping site remains, even if the contractor has been established for many years. The industry uses both its front and back faces, and fraud, which even professionals cannot foresee, lurks in the background on a daily basis.

On the technological front, the introduction of an electronic manifest system and the concept of a waste traceability system were being promoted, but at the time these systems were still in the process of being adopted, and paper-based manifests with blanks, or "fake documents with only a processed stamp," were still rampant. These technologies were only at the experimental stage and did not succeed in stopping the fraud on the frontlines. The combination of systemic fatigue and technological shortcomings led to a sense of helplessness in the field, where there was no way to guarantee safe processing.

This "black list illusion" was not a mere complaint, but a symbolic cry born of the information asymmetry and distrust in the industrial waste industry at the time, and the immaturity of the system and technology.