Rahmi AYDEMİR
Business Development Manager
Aydemirler Proje İmalat Makine ve Bakım A.Ş.
One of the most important factors of modern social welfare is undoubtedly innovations in technology…
It is not possible to limit the welfare to access only to physical resources along with the emerging market and increasing consumption. Health, education and a clean environment constitute the decisive elements of welfare. While a sustainable future trend plays the responsible target role for the sectors hunting consumers in this sense, inadequacy of supervisory bodies with the lack of supportive policies make the atmosphere even more hazy.
In this sense it would be enough to say that the social benefits of basic and applied research supported by the public are more and are more common than the competitive advantages of companies or the growth of the economy. The decisions and measures taken by governments for public health and environmental problems will be accurate examples in terms of the direction of sector.
The transition of the Japanese government to the sound material cycle society is one of the final practices that directly affects the companies and society and initiates the triggering enterprises.
In 1994, Japan’s Basic Environment Plan recognized that socio-economic activities, characterized by “mass production, mass consumption and mass disposal” were a common driving force of various environmental problems. Later, the transition to the “sound material cycle society” became the most important environmental policy priority of the country.
Early efforts focused on recycling, as this was an immediate way to start shifting to a circular society and reduce total solid waste flows, which due to shortage of landfill space was an urgent issue. Waste sorting by consumers for recycling is a visible and easy-to-understand action, and its promotion helped reduce the actual amount of waste as well as publicize the need to improve consumers’ traditional wasteful consumption patterns.
Several recycling laws for specific product categories have been enacted and enforced. They cover containers and packaging, home electric appliances, end-of-life vehicle, food waste, and construction waste. Numerical targets such as recycling rates for these product categories were set, and their progress has been reviewed regularly. Today, 78 percent of PET bottles and 77 percent of wastepaper are collected for recycling in Japan – up from 2 percent and 53 percent respectively in 1995.
Over time, sound material cycle society policies focused less on recycling and downstream treatment of waste and more on linking waste to resource issue upstream. Waste and resource issues are often discussed separately, managed by different authorities, handled by different factories and educated in different schools. Both upstream and downstream problems can be solved in a win-win manner if integrated approaches are taken to manage materials throughout their life cycles.