The Dream of Oil Remaining in Mikasa, Hokkaido: When the Era of Mass Circulation Ended, 1997-2005

The Dream of Oil Remaining in Mikasa, Hokkaido: When the Era of Mass Circulation Ended, 1997-2005
The withdrawal of the Hokkaido Mikasa Oil Processing Center from the waste plastic oil business at the end of March 2005 was not so much a failure of a local business as an event symbolizing the clash between Japan's environmental policy and economic rationality in the early 2000s.

In the late 1990s, Japan was facing a growing shortage of final disposal sites, and the waste problem became a nationwide political issue. Against this backdrop, the Containers and Packaging Recycling Law was enacted and a system began to take off in earnest, under which local governments were responsible for sorted collection and the private sector for recycling. Chemical recycling, such as oilification and gasification, was seen as a trump card to replace incineration and landfill, and the technology to obtain fuel from waste plastic was treated as a symbol of a recycling-oriented society.

The Dohoh Oil Processing Center was established with these expectations in mind. It was conceived as a center for converting waste plastic into resources by linking local government and regional development. However, once the system was put into full operation, the gap between the ideal and reality quickly came to the surface.

The bidding system for recycling under the Containers and Packaging Recycling Law placed stronger emphasis on cost than on the quality of processing. As a result, the market was overwhelmingly in favor of coke oven recycling, which could make use of blast furnaces and existing facilities, and oil conversion, which required heavy capital investment and did not lower the unit cost of processing, was placed at a disadvantage in the bidding competition. The market was sorted not by technological novelty, but by simple price differences.

Even more serious was the quality problem of the municipal plastic used as raw material. The inevitable mixing of foreign substances and materials caused a decline in the quality of the oil produced in the oil conversion process and a deterioration in the yield rate. The more the company assumed mass processing, the more difficult it became to control quality, and the more the processing volume was increased, the worse the profitability became.

Policy thinking at the time was strongly influenced by the numerical target of how much volume could be shifted from incineration or landfill. The Mikasa case was the result of a nationwide uniform system design that did not adequately take into account the appropriate scale of each technology and the characteristics of the raw materials, and the distortions that resulted were exposed at the local level.

After this withdrawal, Japan's waste plastic policy gradually changed direction. Excessive expectations for mass batch processing receded, and the policy was re-positioned toward material recycling based on raw materials with high sorting accuracy and chemical recycling under limited conditions. Oilification was reevaluated as an option with strict conditions rather than a universal technology.

In the 2000s, chemical recycling is once again attracting attention from the perspective of decarbonization and the recycling of chemical raw materials, but the premise for this discussion is the accumulation of failures in the early 2000s. The withdrawal of Mikasa was not a defeat for the local community, but rather a historical lesson that resulted from the time gap between the institutional design and the introduction of the technology.

The dream of mass circulation has come to an end, and the process is shifting to conditional circulation. The quiet dissolution of the Dao Petrochemical Center is positioned at this turning point.