The Formation and the Agenda of Cyclical Society in Asia

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In 2000, Japan promulgated the Basic Law for Establishing a Recycling-based Society and introduced a number of subsidiary laws related to it, thereby launching a series of initiatives to hold down the consumption of natural resources and reduce environmental burdens; but a serious problem here is that China's economic growth has induced a high demand for materials like ferrous scrap, waste paper, and waste plastic, whose prices therefore tend to rise. China is a "magnet" that attracts recyclable resources from Japan and greatly affects Japan's recycling systems. There are three problems.In the first place, China is short on resources yet has a plentiful supply of cheap labor, while Japan has relatively high labor costs and higher recycling costs. Continued economic growth in China will therefore continue to induce the outflow of recyclable resources from Japan.The second problem has to do with Japan's own domestic recycling systems. At least 90% of television sets and other consumer el … More ectronics are made in China and Southeast Asian countries, so even if CRTs were to be recovered and separated, the absence of CRT manufacturing plants in Japan means that the country lacks the very basis for domestic resource cycling operations.Thirdly, Japan's recycling systems are irrational in economic terms. For example, under the container and packaging waste recycling system, municipalities use taxes to collect, transport, and separate glass bottles, cans, PET bottles, and plastic containers, while contractors bear the costs for recycling; but at current prices PET bottles are collected as unmarketable wastes even though they are marketable, and taken to designated recycling centers. It is economically advantageous if glass bottles, cans, PET bottles, and plastic containers can be separated and recovered, but many municipalities collect them without separating them. A new approach must be considered, one which would involve collecting marketable wastes as such through group resource recovery and other means and by gradually reducing the collection of containers and packaging by municipalities, as this would lessen the percentage of waste management achieved through taxes. Less