Will China’s Waste Management Follow Japan’s Well-Worn “Incineration” Path?
Food waste, which accounts for over a third of municipal solid waste, could have been composted and returned to the land, or used to produce biogas. Major cities have already begun implementing waste sorting, but we must also ask: after the sorting, where does the waste actually go? Is food waste being properly managed, or is it being mixed with other waste and sent to incineration?
Meanwhile, the food system also generates all manner of other waste during its operation. It is estimated that in 2020 alone, the food delivery industry produced 570,000 tonnes of plastic waste. Was any of it properly recycled? And in this process, who should bear the cost — businesses or consumers?
And what about Japan, that perennially “advanced” neighbour — how does it handle its waste? The book Where Does the Garbage Go?, read as part of a Foodthink reading group, describes Japan’s current approach to waste management. What exactly distinguishes China and Japan in their approach to waste management? Is Japan’s experience worth learning from for China? At the book club meeting on 22 February, environmental advocates Dr Mao Da and Li Jiacheng each shared their perspectives on these issues. Their remarks are compiled in this article.
Part 1: A Comparison of Current Waste Management in China and Japan
Guest Speaker
Li Jiacheng
Waste Generation
In 2021, approximately 320 million tonnes of municipal solid waste were incinerated and landfilled in China’s urban areas — more than six times the volume in Japan. Based on the urban population, per capita waste generation was 0.94 kg per day, essentially matching Japan’s 2013 level.
Waste Recycling
Food waste constitutes the largest share of municipal solid waste. The book mentions Nagai City’s ‘Rainbow Project’ for food waste collection, which uses composting to process food waste, producing a high-quality compost that is dry and odourless. Although the contamination problem was addressed — only 30 kg of foreign matter in 800 tonnes of food waste — the economic cost of composting was relatively high, so composting could only be limited to the city centre.
In China, the challenges are similar. Food waste sorting is not thorough enough, with significant contamination, and the process faces challenges of odour and operating costs. In four composting projects surveyed by Greenpeace in 2022, even when environmental benefits were taken into account, the overall economic viability of several food waste composting plants was negative.
In China, the recycling of plastics is also far from ideal. In 2020, China generated 60 million tonnes of waste plastics, of which only 26% was recycled, 41.9% was incinerated, and a further 31.4% was landfilled or leaked into the natural environment.
Final Disposal
Now history is repeating itself in China. Fifty years after Tokyo Metropolis set its total incineration target, governments in several Chinese regions (such as Fujian, Hainan, Chongqing, and Anhui) have set similar targets, aiming for 100% waste incineration. Accompanying these targets is the exponential growth of China’s incineration capacity. According to our latest data as of the end of 2022, China has 867 operating waste incineration plants. Spread across more than 300 prefecture-level cities, this means essentially one or more in every city. It is only a matter of time before there is no waste left to burn. Our calculations show that in at least 10 provinces and regions, including Zhejiang and Shandong, waste incineration capacity has exceeded the municipal solid waste collection volume. For example, Zhejiang’s daily incineration capacity exceeds its collection volume by 27,500 tonnes. These incinerators sit idle because they have no waste to burn.
The rapid expansion and over-construction of incineration capacity have also had a negative impact on sorted waste treatment and waste reduction. The figure below shows Shanghai’s published data on waste sorting and treatment for 2021. That year, a total of 3.83 million tonnes of wet waste was generated. However, because the sorting policy was rolled out rapidly and treatment capacity was insufficient, some of the sorted food waste inevitably ended up being incinerated.
This is not unique to Shanghai. Some regions have already recognised the problem. We can see that Beijing, Shanghai, and Haikou are all building new food waste treatment plants.
Incineration Technology
By comparison, this technology adopted in Japan more than twenty years ago is more environmentally friendly than the mainstream approach currently used in China.
China’s mainstream method is landfilling after chelation stabilisation — that is, mixing fly ash with cement or a chelating agent before burying it underground. However, this approach carries greater environmental risks, particularly in the absence of effective oversight: chelation stabilisation may fail within just a few years, causing environmental contamination. Adopting more environmentally sound technologies, on the other hand, involves higher costs and requires government intervention to drive adoption.
Part 2: How Should We View Japan’s Waste Management?
Guest Speaker
Mao Da
Is Japan a Model for Waste Management?
There are probably two reasons why the public thinks this way: first, a certain inertia of thought. Because Japan’s overall environment is relatively good, we assume that all its environmental governance, including waste management, must also be exemplary. Second, the influence of media coverage. However, reports may be incomplete or superficial, preventing us from seeing the full picture and gaining deeper understanding.
NHK’s Cool Japan programme once aired a special episode on the theme of “waste recycling”. It included a street interview segment asking, “Do you think Japan is an advanced country in waste recycling and recovery?” Most of the Asians (including Japanese), Americans, and Australians interviewed felt that Japan was advanced in waste recycling, but the Europeans interviewed all said Japan did not measure up to Europe.
Europeans, comparing Japan with their own countries, may well be right that Japan falls short, but they could also be guilty of conceit or prejudice. So do the Japanese themselves share this view?
Sugimoto Hiroaki, author of Where Does the Garbage Go?, believes that the EU — with Germany as a leading example — is more advanced than Japan in waste management. He is not alone in this view: Hattori Yuichiro, author of The Complete Report on Japan’s Waste Incineration, and Yamamoto Setsuko, author of The Incineration Society, likewise do not regard Japan’s waste management as particularly advanced.
Drawing on multiple perspectives and my own research and observations, my conclusion is this: Globally, Japan cannot be considered the best model for waste management.
The hierarchy of waste management priorities is as follows: first, prevention and source reduction; then recycling and recovery; and only at the very bottom, final disposal without any form of resource recovery. The principle is that problems should be addressed at the highest possible tier; only what cannot be resolved after exhausting all higher-tier measures should fall to the next one. The further down the hierarchy, the smaller the volume of waste — and the lower the pollutant emissions — should be, ultimately forming an inverted triangle from top to bottom.
Japan’s waste management model is not an inverted triangle, nor is it a straightforward triangle either — it more closely resembles an hourglass, broad at both ends and narrow in the middle: source reduction is doing reasonably well, with both total and per capita waste generation declining noticeably year by year; recycling and recovery is relatively weak; and final disposal accounts for a very large share, with landfilling and incineration together making up 80% of all waste treated.
First, a system dominated by incineration. The book closes with the observation: “As long as an incineration-dominated waste management system persists, a ‘3R’ (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) eco-society cannot be realised.” We shall examine in detail later how this system came into being.
Second, producer responsibility has not been fully implemented, resulting in very low recovery efficiency for many recyclables, which are then forced into incineration. This is especially true of food waste, which constitutes the majority of municipal solid waste: in Europe, food waste is either not incinerated or should not be incinerated, yet in Japan most of it is classified as so-called “combustible waste”.
Third, Japan sits at the top of the global industrial supply chain, making it relatively easy both to source inexpensive raw materials from developing countries and to find developing countries willing to accept its waste. Recycling waste domestically in Japan is costly, whereas exporting it is cheap — a disparity that makes domestic waste recycling extremely difficult.
China’s ban on “imported waste” has dealt a significant blow to the waste-export practices of Japan and other developed nations, but it has also spurred them to push harder for the development of domestic recycling industries, which is ultimately beneficial to all parties.
A System Dominated by Incineration
Where Does the Garbage Go? offers its own explanation: Europe has many nations, offering a diversity of technology and economic models, which fosters healthy competition and allows multiple technologies to develop. In Japan’s relatively homogeneous and closed economy, however, incineration technology has tended to monopolise the field.
Political and vested-interest dynamics also play a role. For instance, whether food waste is incinerated or composted, or turned into biogas, depends on where the waste ultimately goes — a question that engages the interests of parliamentarians, different government departments, and the industries behind them, while drawing scholars and experts onto opposing sides as advocates.
Hattori Yuichiro and Yamamoto Setsuko provide a fuller account of this issue in their respective works:
The first is historical path dependence. As early as the 1950s and 1960s, the waste problem had already become a public issue in Japan. The public’s primary concern at the time was the spread of pathogenic bacteria and harmful microorganisms caused by poor waste management, and incineration was naturally an effective countermeasure. Once this technology was adopted, a degree of path dependence set in, narrowing the range of alternatives available.
The second is that the Japanese public focuses on the “quantity” of waste while paying little attention to its “quality”. In other words, whether incineration releases dioxins or heavy metals, the public is largely unconcerned — their priority is simply that visible waste has disappeared.
The third reason, and the one I consider most critical, is a series of statutory provisions and fiscal subsidies.
Statutory provisions strip local authorities of their right to choose technology. The law classifies waste incineration — which generates thermal energy — as a form of “recycling” technology. In effect, this conflates incineration with recycling and has made incineration, in practice, virtually the only “applicable technology”.
Beyond legal sanction, the high cost of incineration also requires fiscal subsidies. The capital- and technology-intensive infrastructure needed for incineration has given rise to an industrial interest group that lobbies extensively both within parliament and within government to advance the incineration sector’s interests. Moreover, interest groups tied to politics and technology deploy misleadingly plausible concepts to confuse the public, manipulating information so that the advantages of alternative approaches remain obscured.
What Should We Learn from Japan?
First is the culture of “thrift”. Where Does the Garbage Go? discusses the rise of second-hand shops in Japan, behind which the culture of thrift plays a role. “Thrift” here means simply not wasting things.
The second lesson worth borrowing is “self-handling plus local self-governance”. In Japan, all basic-level administrative divisions — “municipalities” (cities, towns, and villages) — are local authorities; regardless of their size, they must handle the waste generated in their area by themselves. If waste is to be sent elsewhere for treatment, substantial fees must be paid. This compels each locality to seek its own solutions and proactively consider options suited to local conditions. Under this tradition of local self-governance, people’s intrinsic motivation is awakened, and some star towns and communities have emerged.
Ōsaki Town in Kagoshima Prefecture is a notable example. Ōsaki is a community of just over 10,000 residents with a waste recycling rate as high as 82%, far exceeding Japan’s 20% average.
In the past, the town had only one landfill, which was nearing capacity, while incineration costs were relatively high. This forced the local authority to find ways to reduce waste generation. So they pushed waste sorting to an extraordinary level of detail, laying a strong foundation for subsequent recycling and recovery.
Ōsaki sorted waste into 27 categories, of which the particularly noteworthy point is that food waste was set apart as its own category — a classification that does not exist in most of Japan. Food waste accounts for 62% of the town’s total waste and can be turned into compost. After sorting, only 18% of the waste ultimately requires landfilling, a figure that is extremely rare in Japan.
The third is pollution control technology and specialised recycling and treatment technology.
Pollution control means managing the pollutants generated during waste incineration; all incineration plants are required to have the corresponding facilities installed. Japan has performed reasonably well in this regard, but as Where Does the Garbage Go? notes, the country’s pollutant monitoring remains rather passive. For example, stricter monitoring of mercury only began after the Minamata Convention came into force. Beyond the scope of existing monitoring, new pollutants may emerge, and if they are not actively tracked, they create latent risks.
The second aspect is specialised recycling and treatment technology. For example, for many years, China has lacked adequate facilities for processing collected waste batteries. In Hokkaido, Japan, there is a dedicated recycling and treatment plant that centrally collects and processes waste batteries and fluorescent tubes from across the country.
In addition, Japan’s entire waste governance framework operates within a legal and regulatory process. Although shortcomings remain, the negotiation and contestation of interests among the various stakeholders are still relatively procedural and transparent.
An analysis of policy reveals that China’s waste management still relies primarily on waste incineration as a relatively singular final disposal measure, following a path similar to Japan’s. In reality, however, incineration is not our only option. We need to look to better models from other countries, reflect, and make changes.
Author: Mao Da, Li Jiacheng
Transcript compiled by: Yan’ou
Edited by: Wang Hao