A few trash-related news stories from Japan:

The first is a video from a Washington Post article about Tokyo’s Toshima Incineration Plant, which takes 300 tons of garbage a day turns it into electricity, hot water and a kind of recyclable sand.

Next we have the Yomiuri telling us about how much coastal garbage Japan has to deal with:

According to a survey conducted by the Toyama-based Northwest Pacific Region Environmental Cooperation Center, about 150,000 tons of garbage washes up on Japanese beaches each year, with an estimated 6 percent thought to originate from overseas.

Such waste usually is destroyed by municipalities using public works funds plus a subsidy from those prefectural governments that are responsible for managing the coastline.

However, there are many areas along the Sea of Japan coast where the majority of garbage emanates from other countries. About 43,000 plastic containers bearing Korean characters came ashore during the period from January to March.

As municipalities suffer varying degrees of inconvenience due to the amount of garbage that appears in areas under their control, the ministry has decided to make dealing with the waste the responsibility of the central government, according to the sources.

And Kyodo has a report about a prison guard in Yokohama who violated the human rights of inmates:

Atsushi Kasuga, director of the prison, said in a statement, “The incident is extremely regrettable and I would like to sincerely apologize for diminishing public trust in civil service.”

“We will thoroughly instruct our staff not to cause any similar incidents again,” Kasuga said.

From June to July 2005, the prison guard locked the inmate up in the wired garbage dump for several tens of seconds when the guard took him and other inmates who were all working at a factory inside the prison to dispose of some garbage, according to the Yokohama Prison.

The guard also called the inmate a “fatty” during the period from April to July.

We can only hope that thorough instruction on not calling inmates “fatty” will prevent the reoccurance of such incidents.

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