Municipal solid waste generation in Japan had increased after the high economic growth and bubble period, and has decreased since around 2000. The Ministry of the Environment conducts a " nationwide survey on municipal solid waste management" for local governments every year and publishes the results. In this study, based on the data, the factors affecting the reduction of household waste identified on a local government basis were analyzed. Considering the change in the number of local governments due to “the great municipal mergers of the Heisei era” from 2003 to 2005, the data of the local governments existing in 2018 for 15 years after 2005 were targeted. As a result, there were a sharp decrease due to introduction of the charge for waste discharge and a constant long-term decrease in waste generation throughout the country. Local governments with less waste generation per capita were characterized by high chargeable prices, door-to-door collection, collection of miscellaneous recyclable paper, and regular collection of clothing.

In recent years, interest in the problem of marine plastics and microplastics has been growing globally. International organizations have begun to adopt regulations to mitigate this problem, countermeasures have been actively considered from four perspectives, namely, reduction, recycle/reuse, substitution, and creation (new materials). To address the abovementioned problems, a comprehensive understanding of the causes and issues toward resolutions by overall optimization is crucial. However, the holistic image of the four approaches lacks sufficient comprehension, such that the measures taken only reach sub-optimization in reality. Against this background, this presentation reports on the annual outflow of marine plastics and its causes, calculated using the latest data. Furthermore, it intends to elucidate the current situation regarding regulations and measures implemented by international organizations, countries, and companies.

There is a growing movement towards the elimination of single-use plastics (hereafter referred to as "de-plastics"). The EU's Single-Use Plastics(SUP) Directive requiring Member States to have national legislation in place by July 2021, and a number of measures being introduced in Member States. The 2Rs are expected to be promoted by the plastic-free policy, but the consumer behaviours after the plastic-free policy are not always well examined. Therefore, the authors have studied the behaviours and policies toward the de-plastics, together with the recent trend of SUP policies. As a result, it was suggested that it is difficult to eliminate plastics from packaging of frozen products at present, but there is a possibility for other products. As for the SUP policies, while there are various measures to address single-use plastics, few policies were found to promote the sale of bring-your-own containers or products in reusable containers. It is hoped that measures will be developed to directly support the 2Rs in the future.

I conducted an interview survey of two retailers who are already selling non-perishable foods by packaging-free, in order to clarify the issues that arise during the sales process as well as during the receiving and transportation processes, and how they are solving these possible problems. It was found that hygiene concerns, which had been an issue in the past, were no different from those of supermarkets in that an unspecified number of people come into contact with the products, and that gravity-type fixtures can be used to fill the food without direct contact. Due to the use of the latest technology, and the existence of routes to receive products without generating container and packaging waste, it was thought that it would be possible to sell only the contents of the product in a bring-your-own container in the future.

Awareness raising campaigns for reducing household solid waste have been implemented in various ways by local governments in Japan. However, there is still no study on comparative analysis of those about the direct effect on the waste reduction or indirect effect by promoting other policies such as waste collection fees. The final goal of this research is to conduct such analysis on all the campaigns. As a continuation of last year when the text analysis had been done as for 500 awareness raising campaigns in 158 cities nationwide, this year those campaigns were classified according to the method of intervention types with reference to relevant earlier studies. The analysis result suggested the feature of intervention types that there were many policy examples of "one-way information distribution type", while few "feedback type", "prompt type" and "commitment type".

As a countermeasure against marine litter, marine plastic litter, and scattered litter on land, which have become problems for the international community as a whole, Wakayama Prefecture enacted the Wakayama Prefecture Ordinance on the Prevention of Littering in 2020. This ordinance is not limited to regulatory measures such as on-site inspections, monitoring, and penalties, but also provides for the formulation of wide-ranging and comprehensive measures to prevent littering. On the other hand, basic information on the actual situation of littering in public spaces is still lacking. Therefore, in this study, we surveyed the actual situation of scattered litter accumulation in urban areas, and analyzed the distribution of scattered litter and the amount and composition of scattered litter. As a result of the survey, it was found that cigarette butts were predominant on streets, and candy wrappers and plastic litter were predominant in parks. In addition, the density of scattered litter differed among streets and parks, and several factors were considered.

In Japan, measures for the 3Rs (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) of waste have been promoted, and the quantitative progress has been confirmed by the material flow index. Since the status of waste generation and treatment has regional characteristics, there is a limit to uniform measures nationwide, and it can be said that measures for each municipality are important. We have developed a flow analysis model for each municipality to predict the future, set various measure scenarios, and estimate their effects. In this report, we set a significant introduction scenario of measures related to the suppression of the occurrence of abolition and recycling based on concrete grounds, and estimated the effect by the above-mentioned analysis model. As a result, the recycling rate improved significantly due to measures related to plastics and garbage, but the result did not reach the national target. From the result that it is difficult to achieve the goal even if the measures are introduced from the bottom up, it can be said that there is room for improvement in the method of setting the top-down goal.

In recent years, there has been a need to expand the circulation of waste plastics in Japan due to issues such as restrictions on the import of waste plastics in China and other countries, as well as the excessive quantity of microplastics in the ocean. In addition to macroflows at the national level, it is necessary to understand the detailed flow of waste plastics at the regional level in consideration of plastic circulation optimization. In accordance with the Waste Disposal Law and ordinances, there is an obligation to report industrial waste to prefectures, such as the implementation status reports of industrial waste large-volume discharge business operators, status reports on industrial waste management and those on electronic manifest registration, and the actual results reported by the industrial waste disposal industry. In this study, we developed a method for estimating material flow and spatial movement volume from the bottom up by using the preceding administrative report data.

Many local governments in Japan have stipulated that labels should be removed for separate collection of PET bottles, but recently there has been a method of making labels made of PET and recycling them together with PET bottles. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the amount of waste reduction and material recycling that can be achieved by recycling labels and bottles together, and for this purpose, we proposed a method of estimating the amount of PET bottles from households based on household consumption.

From the viewpoints of marine plastic problems and global warming issues, reduction of marine pollution of plastics and conversion of 3Rs and renewable resources are required. Durable and hygienic PET bottles are indispensable to our lives because of their convenience. However, they account for 6% of the total amount of plastic waste every year in Japan. The purpose of this study is to construct a material flow (MFA) for PET bottle labels in Japan. As the results, the amount of PET bottle labels discarded in 2019 were calculated. The amount of labels calculated using the weight ratio of bottles to labels is about 26,000 tons, while the amount of labels calculated using the average weight of labels is about 25,000 tons. Comparing the two calculation methods, there was a difference of 200 tons for roll labels and 1,000 tons for shrink labels. This is probably because the ratio of roll labels to shrink labels is assumed and the capacity of PET bottles is not distinguished.

In order to understand the actual situation of the transfer of chemical substances to waste based on the data reported in the PRTR, interviews and questionnaire surveys conducted with the companies reporting the PRTR. As a result, the transfer of the chemical substances was mainly consigned disposal as industrial waste. Even in the case where multiple waste types and disposal methods were selected, 90% of them were separately identified. It was found that there was a large discrepancy between the actual situation and the equal apportionment breakdown of the transferred amount.

According to the effectuation of the Minamata Convention on mercury in 2017, environmentally safe disposal of unused mercury is requested. Mercury immobilization facilities and final disposal landfill sites are probably regarded NIMBY and it will be greatly difficult to build them for mercury management in terms of public acceptance. If Japanese citizens have a strongly negative perception to mercury, it makes mercury management, in particular mercury final disposal, more and more difficult. In this context, this study quantitatively measured perceptive aversion to mercury and then compared it with recognition of mercury. The recognition degree showed a strong correlation with the recognition of Minamata disease. It suggests that education and social campaigns on Minamata disease have helped high recognition of mercury in Japan. Individual aversion toward mercury showed no dependency on gender and age. When recognition of mercury is weaker than neutral, individual aversion was constant regardless of recognition degree. On the other hand, individual aversion increased with the increase of recognition degree when the recognition was stronger than neutral. The increase of mercury recognition by educational campaigns of mercury issues might increase aversion toward mercury.

From a nationwide survey of the municipal waste treatment facilities, we focused on the operational attributes of environmental learning facilities and equipment, as well as operational awareness (5 types) and interests in operational content (17 types), and their relationships. To clarify the issues in facility management.

In recent years, many municipalities have begun to introduce or consider introducing applications for garbage separation, because there are various problems in household garbage collection, such as misconfirmation of the garbage collection day, forgetting to put out garbage, and not knowing how to put out or separate garbage. In this study, we surveyed the functions provided by the current garbage sorting application, investigated the functions that are highly convenient, and clarified the usage tendency of each function and the improvement points of the functions by cross tabulation. As a result of the questionnaire survey to understand the most useful functions, it was found that the search function for how to dispose of garbage was convenient and often used. A cross tabulation by gender showed that women tended to use this function more often than men and find it more convenient. A certain number of respondents answered that they would like to see improvements in the monthly and weekly calendar functions, and the garbage disposal search function. This study clarified the usage status of the functions, differences between men and women, and areas for improvement.

Recently, smartphone waste separation applications have been introduced in some municipalities. This study surveys the situation of waste separation applications in all municipalities in the Tohoku and Kanto regions. This survey is based on the information available on each municipality’s website and application downloads from August to September 2020.

The following characteristics were observed: Tohoku is behind Kanto in introducing garbage separation applications, such as in the number of available residents and the average number of application functions; the average functions include the regular garbage collection date announcement, the search of the separation category for the garbage, garbage collection date change announcements.

Fukushima prefecture introduced the garbage separation application to cover all municipalities in April 2021. The application of this prefecture has the average function and a substantial number of available residents.

In Japan, three categories of food waste (food loss in Japanese) generated from households have been defined: direct disposal, leftovers, and excessive removal. However, there have been very few cases where the actual situation of food loss has been investigated because it is difficult to classify excessive removal in waste composition analysis. The Ministry of the Environment has estimated the amount of excessive removal nationwide based on the results of those few cases. However, it is difficult to consider measures to control the generation of excessive removal when the actual situation is not clear.

Therefore, in this study, the excessiveness of excessive removal was eliminated, and excessive removal was defined as the physically edible portions of food that are commonly uneaten, such as cooking scraps. With this definition as a premise, a questionnaire survey was conducted to clarify what kinds of foods (portions) were generally considered to be edible portions that were intentionally removed.

This study investigates the effectiveness of explicit policymaking with targets for food loss and waste (FLW) reduction. Using a unique dataset on the status of policymaking for FLW reduction across Japanese municipalities and an instrumental variable (IV) strategy, we estimate the causal effect of policymaking on FLW reduction in households. We found that having policymaking with targets for FLW reduction in municipal solid waste (MSW) policy induces a reduction in waste output by approximately 8%, indicating that the policy is working as intended. These estimates are unconfounded with other waste redacting-recycling policies such as collection frequency and unit-based pricing systems. Our results suggest that it is important not only to provide insight into the impact of policymaking with targets on the FLW reduction but also to increase our understanding of the impact of public policy decision-making at the municipal level on environmental outcomes.

Within the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), target 12.3 calls for halving per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels (12.3.1(b)), along with a reduction in food losses occurring in the earlier stages of the food supply chain (12.3.1(a)). The progress on target 12.3.1(b) is to be assessed by the Food Waste Index. This paper investigates the current situation of target 12.3.1(b) in various countries, through Voluntary National Review (VNR) reports on SDGs submitted by each country, as well as the Food Waste Index report by UNEP (2020).

We have so far investigated about 50 out of 253 VNR reports available as of July 2021. Not all targets are featured in each country's reports, and target 12.3.1(b) is one of the targets that are not well described in the reports. Only 2 reports indicated a concrete value for target 12.3.1(b).

On the other hand, the Food Waste Index report shows UNEP's estimated values on the index for 215 countries using data from 54 countries, however it is indicated that most countries values are of "very low confidence".

The findings imply that there is a need to disseminate to a large number of countries in the world, the importance of reducing food waste and a straightforward method for measuring it.

In Japan, local governments have asked restaurants to become “Food Loss Prevention Restaurant (FLPR)” to help reduce food loss. However, this activity has not met positive results. Thus, local governments struggle to increase the number of FLPR.

The objective of this research is to identify the current challenges. It seeks to find effective approaches to local governments to increase the number of FLPR in Tokyo 23 wards, where annual cost of eating at restaurants is highest in Japan. The statistical results show that effective ways of promoting FLPR can be done through cooperation with restaurant associations and shortening the application period. Whereas the wards had not followed up FLPR’s activity. They had not shared their experience and knowledge with other wards.

This study focused on business-related food loss, which accounts for more than half of the domestic food loss. We collected the weight of food loss at supplier and the weight of food use at welfare-related facility assumed to be the possible recipients of food losses and clarified actual condition.

In addition, the median and confidence interval of the ratio of supply and demand matching (matching rate) were estimated by bootstrap method using daily data of the amount of food generated and used by each food type. The purpose of this study was to obtain basic information that would contribute to policy prioritization and systematic promotion of the reduction and utilization of business-related food loss in Okayama Prefecture by examining the matching of food loss

This study focuses on the indicators for evaluating the use of secondary materials in production activities, which are set in national circular economy plan (strategy) mainly in the EU, European countries, Japan and China and examined effective use of the indicators to achieve circular economy and decoupling.

While, EU, France, Germany and Finland have set up similar indicators and targets to Japan's cyclical use rate (input) among the target countries, only Japan and Finland have set targets. The use of recycled materials is useful to achieve decoupling and the role of indicators to measure the progress is important. However, there are some issues to be solved for effective operation, such as the necessity to set up evaluation indicators for the reduction of primary resources in parallel with the development of secondary resource statistics and methodologies.

The objective of this study was to experimentally clarify the effect of the presence or absence of food wastes and plastic wastes on the compressive behavior of combustible waste to obtain basic data on the efficiency of long-distance transportation, considering the area expansion and future changes in resource separation. Three types of simulated waste were adjusted for compaction experiments: with food waste and plastic, without food waste, and without plastic. In the high surface pressure of 5 to 10 kg/cm², the dry apparent density was greater in the order of without plastic, without food waste, and with food waste and plastics. To examine this reason, compaction experiments for each compositional waste were conducted. It was found that the void of food waste was almost saturated with water, and when it was compressed, the water was discharged, and the void became smaller. The majority of the void in the plastic wastes was air, and the void structure did not change with water content. The reason why the dry apparent density became larger when plastic was excluded was that the void of the waste was collapsed when plastic wastes with a lot of air were excluded.

The Ward-based Approach (WBA), which has been introduced in the municipal solid waste management of Dhaka North and South cities and Chattogram city in Bangladesh, is a decentralized waste management system in the wards, the smallest administrative unit in the city area. In this paper, the optimal population size is examined for decentralized waste management in terms of the cleaning services that are the characteristics of waste management in Bangladesh. In addition, although it is common to set the population size that minimizes the expenditure per citizen as the "optimal population size", since basic data is not sufficient in Bangladesh, regression analysis was performed by setting the number of cleaning staff in the cleaning business as the objective variable. As a result, it was found that the optimal population size is about 94,460 (between about 84,135 and about 104,745 in the 95% confidence interval). This suggests that in the case of Bangladesh, a “demerit of scale” could influence on a smaller scale than expected in Japan.

Waste treatment facilities, which have been regarded as nuisance facilities, are about to be transformed into facilities that contribute to the community. For example, an increasing number of facilities are being developed as centers for environmental learning, environmental activities, and recreation, with additional facilities such as bathing facilities, environmental learning facilities, biotopes, gymnasiums, and parks. In addition, based on the concept of a Regional Circular and Ecological Sphere, its potential to create multifaceted value such as energy supply is also expected.

Once the facility is completed, full-scale operation will begin. In terms of waste treatment, it is fundamental to continue safe and stable waste incineration and other operations over the long term. Also in terms of contributing to the local community, it will be important to effectively utilize the additional equipment installed, while aiming for the development and growth of the facility.

In this paper, I analyzed the operation of the Fuji City Shin-Kankyo Clean Center, which was completed in September 2020 and equipped with additional facilities for citizens to learn about and experience the environment, from the perspective of people and activities as well as from the perspective of the facilities for visitors, to find out how it can develop and grow.

From the initial plan of the Municipal Waste Management facility registered in the database of Public Consultation Center, the office of Prime Minister, I have organized the technology, initial investment cost, capacity, and actors such as universities, consulting and engineering companies. As a result of analyzing 265 projects, the number of plans for waste power generation facilities has increased more than MBT / RDF facilities in recent years. Looking at the average initial investment per capacity, MBT / RDF facilities were 2.9 million baht / ton / day, while waste power generation facilities were 4.6 million baht / ton / day, which is about 1.6 times higher.