Illegal dumping of industrial waste at the Aomori/Iwate border, Summer 2002

Illegal dumping of industrial waste at the Aomori/Iwate border, Summer 2002

In the summer of 2002, Japan's largest case of illegal industrial waste dumping was uncovered in the mountainous area straddling the border between Aomori and Iwate prefectures, in the cities of Towada and Ninohe. The total volume of illegally dumped waste amounted to approximately 820,000 cubic meters, far exceeding the 500,000 cubic meter incident in Teshima, Kagawa Prefecture, which was previously considered the largest. Some of the waste included medical wastes, and it was suspected that hospitals and medical institutions in the Tokyo metropolitan area were involved through disposal companies, making the "imposition of waste" from urban areas to rural areas visible.

The background of the times at that time was the worsening of the waste disposal problem since the 1990s. The bill for the mass-production and mass-consumption society that had continued since the period of rapid economic growth came to the surface, and the tightness of final disposal sites and rampant illegal dumping were becoming social problems. In particular, the dioxin problem led to the closure of incinerators one after another, and industrial waste disposal was beginning to lose its receptacles in urban areas. Under such circumstances, malicious companies selling low disposal costs were dumping large quantities of waste in the mountains, forests, and valleys of the countryside, and government monitoring could not keep up with the spreading situation.

This incident highlighted the inadequacies of the responsibility of industrial waste generators and of the monitoring system that transcends local governments. Local residents in Aomori and Iwate were deeply concerned about groundwater contamination and destruction of nature, and environmental groups and the media reported daily on the site. The composition of depopulated rural areas as "dumping grounds" for urban wastes, combined with regional disparities and environmental justice issues, has provoked serious social debate.

Since 2003, the Ministry of the Environment and the local governments concerned have been working on plans to uncover waste disposal companies and remove waste, and have also proposed the installation of surveillance cameras and stricter penalties to prevent illegal dumping. However, the removal of the enormous amount of waste and environmental remediation required many years and huge costs, and the incident will be remembered as symbolic of the "waste crisis" in Japan in the early 2000s.