A Sense of Crisis in Designing a System Based on the Premise of Improper Disposal (Late 1990s)

A Sense of Crisis in Designing a System Based on the Premise of Improper Disposal (Late 1990s)
In the late 1990s, there was a shared sense of serious crisis in Japan's waste administration that the system had to be redesigned on the premise that illegal dumping and improper disposal would occur itself. The perception of the administration presented in this issue is unique in that it sees illegal dumping not as an exceptional crime committed by a few malicious companies, but as a structural environmental crime that is inevitably created by the lack of treatment facilities and institutional fatigue.

As the remaining life of final disposal facilities for industrial waste becomes tighter and the construction of new private disposal facilities becomes more difficult due to opposition from local residents and concerns about environmental risks, businesses that adhere to proper disposal are forced to bear more costs and burdens, creating a contradiction in which illegal disposal emerges as a realistic option. In response to this situation, the government recognized that there was a limit to what could be done by simply strengthening enforcement, and it sought to steer a course toward securing disposal infrastructure in a public manner, such as by promoting the construction of disposal facilities under the responsibility of prefectural governments.

This description indicates that the idea of grasping environmental destruction not as a matter of individual ethics or legal compliance, but as a crime created by the institutional design itself, was already embedded in the administrative context. This issue of the Journal provides a straightforward picture of the historical situation at the end of the 1990s, when environmental problems were transformed not into accidents or deviations but into crimes arising from institutional distortions.