Shortage of final disposal sites for industrial waste and concerns about increasing illegal dumping (late 1990s)

Shortage of final disposal sites for industrial waste and concerns about increasing illegal dumping (late 1990s)
At the end of the 1990s, Japan's industrial waste administration had entered a clear deadlock phase. The figure shown in this issue, "1.6 years remaining for final disposal sites (as of 1999)," was not just a statistic, but also a warning that the entire system had reached its limits. Industrial waste, such as construction waste, sludge, and incinerated ash, which had expanded during the period of high economic growth and the bubble economy, was beginning to exceed the capacity of local governments and private disposal companies in terms of both quantity and quality.

The biggest reason for the growing shortage of disposal sites was the fact that it was almost impossible to build new ones, and the dioxin problem and toxic substance spills that occurred one after another in the 1990s caused an extreme increase in the public's distrust of disposal sites. Concerns about groundwater contamination, odors, and future restrictions on land use led to opposition to plans for private repositories in many areas, and governments were no longer able to push through strongly enough. As a result, the social dilemma of "a facility that is needed but no one will accept" became fixed.

What is important about the article in this issue is that it views this situation not as a mere environmental problem, but as "a structure that induces illegal dumping. If disposal sites become scarce and disposal costs soar, the incentive for emitters and miscreants to obey the law will rapidly disappear. The background to the sharp increase in illegal dumping in mountain forests and riverbeds, cross-border dumping across prefectural borders, and evasion of disposal by falsifying documents in the late 1990s was the institutional blockade.

This problem should be understood not as a moral decline but as "an environmental crime created by the dysfunction of legal disposal routes. The recognition of the crisis by the government in the article indicates that there is a limit to what can be done by simply strengthening crackdowns, and that it is necessary to rebuild the processing infrastructure and the institutional design itself. In fact, it was around this time that the manifest system was strengthened, regulations on processors were tightened, and wide-area processing and melting furnaces were introduced.

What this issue depicts is the state of environmental destruction just before it became manifest as illegal activities, a typical example of institutional fatigue giving rise to crime. The issue of final disposal sites for industrial waste clearly illustrated the structure of environmental destruction caused by the fragility of the legal system and social consensus, as well as the natural environment.