The japan journal

The japan journal

January, 2008

COVER STORY

Cooling JapanA United Front against Global Warming

At this summer's G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit, measures to combat global warming are likely to figure prominently on the agenda to be set by Japan. In this article we highlight some of the environmental initiatives pursued by Japan to date at individual, private and public levelsto fight pollution both at home and overseas and to counter global warming.

Located nearly at the center of the Japanese archipelago, Biwa-ko is the largest lake in Japan. Designated a registered wetland under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, the lake is home to many valuable and endemic species and has long supported the local population as a source of drinking water, a fishing ground and for agricultural use.

Thirty years ago a large part of the surface of Biwa-ko turned a reddish color and the air filled with the stench of rotting fish. It was a large-scale red tide. The eerie spectacle, which some saw as the lake's lament, greatly shocked nearby residents.

One local who was gripped by a sense of crisis was Fujii Ayako, now chief director of the Environment Co-operative Union Shiga, who says her first thought was that the lake might die. Six years previously her husband had been transferred, and they had relocated to the town of Moriyama on the shores of Biwa-ko in Shiga prefecture. As a student, she had been affected by Minamata disease, one of the four big pollution-related illnesses of Japan, which occurred when a chemical plant released mercury into the sea in the 1950s, causing outbreaks of neurogenic diseases among local residents and their unborn children after eating fish contaminated with the mercury. As a result, Fujii felt more uneasy than most about the incident at the lake.

The widespread use of synthetic detergents containing phosphorous in place of powdered soap at the time was identified as one reason for the red tide. The phosphorous present in the detergent causes eutrophication in the lake. The awareness of being both victims and perpetrators mobilized the residents and the Soap Campaign, which collected used cooking oil and turned it into powdered soap free of phosphorous, gathered momentum.

At the time, Fujii, who was involved in food safety at a regional cooperative covering four cities and seventeen towns, and her colleagues were driving the movement forward. Before the red tide in 1977 about 10% of households used powdered soap, but as a result of the campaign, close to half of all households switched to powdered soap, and in 1979 the prefectural government introduced legislation to control synthetic detergents. The residents had managed to sway the government.

Nanohana ProjectWhen it peaked in 1980, the ratio of powdered soap use had risen to 70.6% but as synthetic detergents free of phosphorus became commercially available, usage declined again. Fujii was left fretting that there would be nowhere to take the waste cooking oil that had been collected.

Around this time, Fujii visited Germany where a project to grow rape blossoms on fallow land to produce bio diesel fuel (BDF) as an alternative to fossil fuels had been underway since the oil shock in 1973. In much the same way as fossil fuel, BDF produces CO2 when it combusts, but since the plants that provide the raw material absorb CO2 during the growing process, bio diesel fuel does not add CO2 to the atmosphere. Not only is it environmentally friendly, it creates a framework for the local production of energy for local consumption and so also ties in with regional self-reliance and regeneration.

As Fujii tells it, "The scales fell from my eyes. I thought that we could refine the waste cooking oil, and turn it into BDF and I promptly started negotiations with the Mayor of Aito (now, Higashiomi) in Shiga prefecture at Biwa-ko and set about developing plans for a refinery."

The test plans were brought to fruition with the help of subsidies from the national and prefectural governments. Test vehicles using BDF for fuel were soon driving around with the smell of deep-fried food wafting from their exhaust pipes. The fuel has been used in four of the town's official vehicles since 1995.

As the applications for BDF broadened to include city buses, tractors and fishing boats, it soon became clear that the demand could not be met by collecting waste oil from households. Yet again, Fujii took a leaf out of the German book and proposed sowing rapeseed on land that had been taken out of cultivation.

"There was certainly no shortage of agricultural land. By this time I had visited every nook and cranny in the town so when I mentioned the idea of planting rapeseed, lots of people said that we could use their fields," reminisces Fujii.

This was the start of the Nanohana Project, a system to recycle resources by growing rape blossom ("nanohana" in Japanese) for cooking oil, collecting the waste oil, and turning it into BDF, and it all happened the year after the Kyoto Protocol was adopted at the Third Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP3) in 1997.

The main premise for the recycling system is the participation of citizens.

"In Aito, the waste household oil is collected by roster and taken to a storage depot in the town. Local children also participate by planting and harvesting the rape. That's not all, electrical power generated with BDF is used to light 250,000 bulbs. Local people are quite excited about the project because it goes beyond recycling garbage." When Fujii talks about the project, her eyes light up. She recalls how in 1987 local residents had formed a human chain around Biwa-ko to raise money to build a new facility for children with disabilities. Such cooperative acts, she feels, have strengthened residents' unity and contributed to the success of the Nanohana Project.

The Nanohana Project is expanding across the country, with around 1,000 hectares planted with rape in Japan and more farmers joining every year. At the prodding of Fujii and other project members, large corporations such as Yamato Transport and Matsushita Electric Industrial have recently started to use BDF in company vehicles that operate locally. The project is also now spreading across the seas to Korea, China, Mongolia and elsewhere.

"The project started as a way to improve the environment at Biwa-ko, but it has now moved beyond the boundaries of an environmental project and has contributed to revitalizing the local economy, and it has created a region that will be sustainable through our children's and grandchildren's generations," says Fujii.

The Soap Campaign started as a measure to preserve the environment, but it is plain that BDF has a role in the fight to counter global warming. Having surmounted one kind of pollution, the Nanohana Project, which is linked to efforts to counter global warming and to the revitalization of an entire region, seems to be pointing out the way for all kinds of environmental projects in Japan.

A Long History of PollutionIn the summer of 2007, Japan was assailed by a record-breaking heat wave. Abnormal temperatures were being recorded across the nation, with one spot registering 40.9C, the highest temperature in the history of domestic meteorological observations. The abnormal heat caused many people to directly feel the effects of global warming. According to the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), average temperatures worldwide will increase by 0.2C per decade until 2030. Reducing CO2 emissions has become a problem for the entire world.

In fact, it has been barely ten years since we first heard vociferous demands like the ones we hear today to reduce CO2 emissions. Before that time, the urgency was in removing the pollution that had become a common blight under the strain of industrialization.

The origin of pollution in Japan can be traced back to an incident that occurred in the 1880s as a direct result of mining. The incident took place during a time of rapid modernization, as Japan underwent the transition from Edo period society to the Meiji period. The incident caused grave harm to local residents and the surrounding environment, and it stayed in the minds of many people for years to come.

After the postwar reconstruction, as the country rushed into the era of rapid economic growth, the atmospheric pollution caused by factories releasing soot and smoke, sulfur oxide, and nitrogen oxide into the air turned into a social issue. The awful state of air pollution in Japan was reported in newspapers in the United States and elsewhere and Japan acquired a bad reputation throughout the world. The situation grew even more grave in the mid-fifties with the advent of Minamata disease and other fatal illnesses caused by pollution. This was when people's attitudes to pollution began to change.

The government also embarked on countermeasures, making its basic stance on the environment clear by enacting fourteen pollution-related laws including the 1967 Basic Law for Environmental Pollution, which clearly stated the obligations of corporations, the national government, and local authorities in preventing pollution. The following year saw the enactment of the Noise Regulation Law and the Air Pollution Control Law, which established controls for exhaust gas from automobiles, and in 1970 the Water Pollution Control Law followed. In 1971 the Environment Agency (today, the Ministry of the Environment) was set up with responsibility for environmental policy. Since then, legislation for the environment has been improved and strengthened on a continual basis.

Technological DevelopmentFaced with these stringent regulations, companies began to step up their antipollution measures. Previously, the corporate sector had invested about 2-3% of total capital outlays in antipollution measures, but according to the Environmental White Paper for 1991, this ratio increased to nearly 20% at its peak between 1974 and 1976. Shortly after that, the Japanese economy was hit by the second oil shock and registered its first period of negative growth since the end of the war, making it very difficult for companies to increase any kind of investment.

However, there were no signs of regret from the corporations. One might speculate that this was due to the legacy of past pollution incidents, such as the Ashio incident, which was fresh in the minds of management, and that decision-making reflected the gravity of having to pay out compensation to victims and suffering a sullied image. The problems posed by the oil crisis also spurred corporations to develop technologies to save energy. Corporate persistence at the time became the driving force that transformed Japan into a nation in possession of advanced environmental technology.

By the late 1980s, environmental problems on a worldwide scale such as global warming and the destruction of the ozone layer had been identified. In 1992, the Framework Convention on Climate Change was adopted and the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. As one of the ratifying countries, Japan found that measures to counter global warming demanded a broader outlook than antipollution measures for a restricted area.

At this turning point, Japanese environmental technology which had been developed to counter pollution became increasingly sophisticated.

For example, automobiles are responsible for roughly 17% of worldwide CO2 emissions. As might be expected, the burden on the environment is considerable and for automobile manufacturers, environmental initiatives are a matter of life or death. Every manufacturer is developing cars that emit less exhaust and are more fuel-efficient, but Honda Motor stole the march on the competition in 1971 when the company developed the CVCC (Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion) engine which reduced the harmful substances in exhaust gases through lean burning. At the time, Honda took the world by surprise when it became the first company to clear the strict exhaust gas standards set by the Muskie Act in the United Statesstandards which were thought impossible to achieve.

Just in Time for the Twenty-first CenturyIn the 1990s, as the world began to clamor for measures to combat global warming, Toyota Motor started the work of sketching out a new vision for the car of the twenty-first century.

Tajima Hidehiko, general manager of the CSR & Environmental Affairs Division at Toyota Motors tells it like this: "At the time there was this sense of crisis that if you didn't build good products that were environmentally friendly, you would no longer be a going concern at some point in the near future. Sooner or later resources would run dry, too. It meant that as a manufacturer of cars, you had to take responsible action."

That is why in 1994, ten members of staff from each division of Toyota gathered to launch the G21 project to develop a car for the twenty-first century. At first, the vision was to improve fuel consumption by 50% by introducing a direct fuel-injection gasoline engine. Not only did senior management reject the idea, they raised the hurdle by saying that an improvement of 50% was not enough; it had to be a 100% improvement.

The driving force to resolve this challenge could only be found in the hybrid system, which was under development in a different project. In December 1997, when the first Prius hybrid vehicle went on sale with the slogan "Just in time for the twenty-first century," peripheral technologies such as battery performance and control systems evolved by leaps and bounds. The hybrid system, which combines an electric motor with a gasoline engine, gets twice the mileage of a standard gasoline-powered car because energy is converted and stored in the electric battery when the vehicle decelerates during driving. The price tag for the vehicle is 2.15 million yen (18,700 dollars), keeping the price difference with other popular cars below 500,000 yen.

There were more improvements to come when the second generation Prius went on sale in 2003. Driving performance had been improved to match or outperform gasoline-powered cars and sales shot up. The vehicle was also very popular abroad with many Hollywood film stars favoring the vehicle, which contributed a great deal to raising Toyota's image.

In May 2007 worldwide sales of Toyota hybrid cars, including existing models fitted with the hybrid system, breached one million. By preliminary calculation this represents a reduction of 3.5 million tons of CO2 worldwide. While keeping a close eye on emulators among the competition, Toyota aims to sell one million hybrid vehicles a year as early as the second decade of the twenty-first century, and plans to further expand the range of models and to continue the pursuit of improvements.

Since the start of the 1990s, the theme for the Tokyo Motor Show has been the environment. This year, at the 40th Motor Show, domestic and international manufacturers displayed about seventy experimental models including hybrid cars, fuel cell cars, electric vehicles and diesel cars. Toyota unveiled its 1/X concept car which, in terms of weight, has been reduced to one third of the Prius while getting twice the mileage and maintaining the same interior space. The car can run on bioethanol and is fitted with a plug-in hybrid system which can be charged from an external power point. Expectations were high for a successor to the Prius that will reduce CO2 emissions and is geared towards energy diversification. As for the future, Toyota will continue to develop versatile eco cars that provide a fit with the market.

Toyota DNA and the EnvironmentThe undivided attention to the environment is evident on the shop floor. "From the moment of creation, the Toyota production model incorporates an ethos that is linked to environmental measures," Tajima explains. For example, there is the "yosedome" approach to reducing CO2 emissions during the production stages. By introducing improvements at the production site, this approach reduces equipment downtime, consolidates production lines, and bolsters productivity at each line.

Kawaguchi Takamori, project general manager with the Environmental Affairs Department at Toyota's CSR & Environmental Affairs Division explains the approach: "We cannot afford to miss out on any opportunities to improve productivity and reduce costs so that we can offer customers vehicles at a reasonable price. In terms of results, this approach ties in with CO2 reduction." Production and the environment are two sides of the same coin, so to speak.

"If we say 'improved productivity' it might be that only the specialists in each department understand what we mean, but if we say 'reduce CO2' everybody understands what we mean and we can roll it out across all factories. It's no exaggeration to say that 'the environment' is a common language throughout the company."

Adds Kawaguchi, "Our environmental measures are definitely not high-profile. I would say that the fundamental approach is to plug away steadily on day-to-day management and improvements."

"Kaizen" (continuous improvement) is the philosophy at the heart of Toyota. It was introduced when the company was founded as a way of competing with the Western giants. Productivity and quality were improved as a result of thoroughly excluding wasteful processes. This is the DNA that Toyota shares with other manufacturers and in the current climate of environmental awareness, Japan's approach to manufacturing is still getting the message across.

Developing Countries and Global WarmingJapan has broadened its approach to the environment from antipollution measures to efforts to counter global warming. This is the time to take on the role of sharing the accumulated experience with the rest of the world, including developing nations. With the environment as an important pillar of international cooperation, Japan is extending technological cooperation, interest-free financial aid and yen loans through overseas development assistance (ODA). In recent years, aid with an environmental focus has comprised 30-40% of all ODA, and 40-60% of yen loans only.

In the midst of this, a new concept for supporting work in the environmental field has emerged and this is where Japan is taking the lead. It is the concept of using ODA for clean development mechanism (CDM) projects.

Until recently, the international community had not approved ODA contributions to CDM projects. This may have been due to concern among developing nations that ODA would shift from emissions trading to CDM projects. However, Japan has pointed out that current CDM projects are weighted towards the BRICs and other newly industrializing economies, and has argued that it is possible to eliminate such skewed distribution through ODA. In 2004, the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) approved the use of ODA for CDM projects marking the start of yen loans to the Zafarana Wind Power Plant in Egypt, which became the first CDM project to use ODA.

The Co-benefits of AidJapan is also focusing on "co-benefit projects" which contribute to developing the economies of emerging nations while advancing measures to counter pollution and global warming. One such example is the Japan-China Environmental Model City Project underway in the city of Guiyang in Guizhou Province in the south of China.

Guiyang is the capital of Guizhou Province and sits surrounded by a beautiful rural landscape of terraced rice-fields in a mountainous region. The concentration of heavy industry to the city has resulted in remarkable economic development. As the city is surrounded by mountains on all four sides, the smoke and soot emitted by the factories tends to settle over the city and had turned it into a particularly serious case of damage from air pollution and acid rain.

In 1997, the governments of China and Japan came up with a plan for a project to use Japan's expertise in combating pollution to improve the urban environment in China and to raise the standard of environmental management. Guiyang was selected along with Dalian and Chongquing as environmental model cities. Obtaining yen loans and back-up for technological cooperation from the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the project experimented with various urban improvements in Guiyang including the introduction of new technology to factories that had been using mercury and refitting deteriorating steel factories.

Much effort also went into developing human resources. Guiyang dispatched staff members to Japan to visit Kitakyushu (city in Fukuoka prefecture) and other local governments that possess know-how in environmental management systems, developed from their experience fighting pollution.

The deputy director general of Development Assistance Department II at JBIC, Kitano Naohiro, tells the story.

"Based on these observations, Guiyang became the first city in China to bring in economic policies with a recycling orientation and regulations that pressed for waste recycling and zero emissions during manufacturing. This became the impetus for drafting regulations in other cities and in 2006, the central government incorporated these measures in its five-year plan for the country. Measures that were implemented at the local level by learning from Japan through the yen loans have had a bottom-up impact that has reached as far as the central government. Guiyang has become a model for the whole country on soft issues as well."

Keeping windows open used to be impossible but the changes have been such that now a food market is opening near one of the factories. The project has substantially reduced air pollution but that is not all; CO2 emissions have also been reduced by 1.07 million tons a year. In short, the project has not only countered pollution but has played a part in combating global warming.

The newly industrializing economies and developing countries that are eager to develop their economies must not view measures to counter global warming as obstacles to economic development. This project has demonstrated that the key to involving countries that hesitate when faced with the effort to combat global warming is to provide aid in a form that shows that development and measures to counter global warming can coexist. In addition, CDM projects have the potential to engage in emissions rights trading for the portion of CO2 that is reduced. The government of Japan is planning to make the concept of "co-benefit projects" the centerpiece for aid with an environmental orientation.

In the past, Japan has had experience with pollution caused by economic development that spun out of control, destroying the environment, and even taking human life. Today the country is still dealing with the issue of on-going lawsuits that stem from illnesses caused by pollution. There is no mistaking the fact that this is a stain on the nation's history. It may be that the most significant contribution Japan can make in the fight against global warming is to use this experience as a springboard for increasing international contributions in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

KAMAHORI Miki, The Japan Journal