2023 | 9 min read
If you’re looking for a secure, well-paid job in Tokyo that doesn’t require you to speak much Japanese, you could do worse than become a garbageman. The garbageman enjoys all the benefits of a public employee without the interaction with the public. He’s a man, almost always a man, of few words. It would be more accurate to say that his entire professional jargon consists of the single shout “WEYYYYY!” which, as it always precipitates the movements of a truck, seems to mean “That’s everything.”
It’s no surprise to see that Tokyo garbage-truck crews are becoming more international. The world is catching on. I realised far too late that garbageman had become a desirable occupation. But these younger guys are living the Japanese dream. And it’s not even dirty work. I’ve been in train stations and hotel rooms in other parts of the world that were noticeably filthier than Tokyo’s sanitation system.
That system is open for public inspection via a series of tours run by the Clean Authority of Tokyo, the entity that coordinates waste management among Tokyo’s 23 wards. Each tour takes in a different incinerator in the morning and concludes with a landfill inspection in the afternoon. The tour bus departs from Tokyo Teleport Station on a Wednesday morning and heads to whichever incinerator will be baring its fiery insides to visitors that day.
Today it’s the turn of the Shinagawa Incineration Plant. I arrive at the bus stop early, meaning there’s plenty of time for small talk with the representative from the Clean Authority of Tokyo, a woman of thoughtful eyewear, crisp overalls, and clutched clipboard. I’m keen to convince her that I’m an inquisitive, broad-minded citizen and not one of those, you know, incinerator nerds.
She’ll be leading this tour, making sure that everyone leaves with a clear understanding of how seriously Tokyo takes its waste management, and that nobody falls in. Except she didn’t say the last part. I mention that I’ve come from Setagaya. “Oh, Kinuta?” she says hopefully, making it clear that she really does see the city as one giant map of incinerators. “Not far from Kinuta,” I reassure her. And it’s true, I really can see that cheerful chimney from my building. The presence of waste incineration plants in ordinary neighbourhoods is unremarkable today, but it wasn’t always that way.
Incinerator tours began in the 1970s as a way of gaining public understanding for an unpopular policy move: forcing each ward to build its own incineration plant. Tokyo now has 26 incineration plants across all but the most central wards. Yes, Shinjuku, I’m looking at you. Most of these incinerators are second-generation or retrofitted “thermal recycling” models. People want to know about the Tokyo nightlife, but I’m getting too old for that. Ask me about the daylife, I say. Well, you’ve got libraries, empty department stores, and incinerator tours.
That 23 wards (sometimes pretentiously called “cities”) each provide their own municipal services explains why Tokyo can’t just build a few mega-incinerators around the edge of the bay. At one time, bay-facing Kōtō Ward had been the garbageman of Tokyo, shouldering most of the burden of disposing of its trash. Kōtō was home to the Yumenoshima (“Island of Dreams”) landfill, which was notorious for releasing swarms of flies into the streets and homes of local residents. By the peak Showa years of the 1960s, Yumenoshima had become the festering open sore on Tokyo’s newfound prosperity and runaway consumer culture.
In 1967, Ryokichi Minobe won the gubernatorial election by billing himself as a “clean-up man for Tokyo” who would make each ward responsible for its own waste. In practice, that meant overcoming public resistance to the building of incinerators in ordinary neighbourhoods. Tokyo was plunged into a period of civil strife and street battles that became known as the gomi-sensō, or garbage wars. By 1971, residents of Kōtō Ward were blockading roads to prevent garbage trucks arriving from other parts of the city that were reluctant to fall under the spell of the incinerator.
Today, the Clean Authority of Tokyo is proud to show off its remarkably clean fleet of incinerators. The nose of the tour bus dips into a tunnel under Tokyo Bay and re-emerges a few minutes later in Shinagawa Ward. The bus pulls off the Wangan (“Bayshore”) Expressway into the manicured reception area of the Shinagawa Incineration Plant. This is where those distinctive blue garbage trucks beetle from all over Shinagawa Ward (pop: 380,000) to deposit their neatly bagged loads of, well, filthy stinking trash.
These are not just any old garbage trucks (a large and unruly category of trash transporters) but packer trucks, which mechanically compact their loads. Only packer trucks like these are small enough to negotiate Tokyo’s narrow backstreets. After arriving at the plant, each truck passes through a weighing station and ascends to a platform, where it backs up to a small opening high above the plant’s massive waste bunker. This is one situation where you really don’t want to confuse the accelerator pedal for the brake.
The bunker must be so massive because, in the event of a serious outage at the plant, this is where the combined burnable garbage of all Shinagawa households would accumulate over several days or even weeks. The Shinagawa plant is a fully continuous combustion grate incinerator, which means automated cranes are constantly at work grabbing huge metal fistfuls of trash and dumping it down a chute (devilishly called a “throat”) from where it travels down a terrible escalator of moving steel grates and is burned at temperatures of 850°C.
There’s a reason it’s so important to separate your trash, and it may not be the reason you think. Separation aids recycling, but it’s also about keeping Tokyo’s incinerators out of trouble. Just one small metal object – a stray can, say – lodged between the moving grates can bring the entire plant to a grinding halt. Every few months, an incineration plant somewhere in Tokyo will experience the non-nuclear equivalent of a cold shutdown. It can take weeks to bring one back online. For the love of fully continuous combustion grate incineration, people, check your trashbags.
Alright then, I’ll say what’s on your mind. Incineration isn’t exactly the poster child of the waste management matrix, is it? Can’t Tokyo do better than burn its trash? It almost certainly can and should do more to eliminate waste at source. But there’s another story that deserves to be told. Tokyo is on a historic 30-year streak of reducing the amount of waste it sends to landfill. Since 1989, or Heisei Year Zero, a particularly egregious year for wasteful consumption, the amount of waste sent to landfill has fallen by more than 80%. And that landfill component now consists of almost zero solid waste.
Two things combined to cause this. First, stricter recycling laws came into effect in the 1990s, ending the era of “big gomi” and forcing manufacturers to factor in the cost of disposing of household appliances and other large items. The knock-on effect was to spur the growth of Tokyo’s now-enormous second-hand economy. Second, a new generation of thermal-recycling incinerators came online during the 2000s. As well as generating electricity from heat, these incinerators reduce waste to around 1/20 of its former volume, including – not without controversy – plastics.
Thermal recycling says basically that since we have no way of recycling most plastics, we might as well burn them for energy. Doing so safely requires some expensive technology, and Japan is one of the few countries willing to make the investment. At incineration plants like the one on Shinagawa, toxic exhaust gases such as dioxins and nitrogen oxides are removed, or at least reduced to levels considered harmless, by complex arrays of particle filters, rapid cooling, and catalytic action.
Thermal recycling sounds positively lovely, combining as it does the feelgood factor of recycling with the promise of warmth. Yet it remains controversial outside of a few countries such as Japan and the Netherlands that have fully embraced it. That’s because thermal recycling also emits carbon dioxide, albeit at levels less harmful than the methane from landfill or the equivalent energy burned from coal. Incineration also produces one solid byproduct, ash, and it’s ash that we must turn to next today.
Before we leave the plant, the woman from the Clean Authority of Tokyo points out a small grey building off to one side. This is the only remaining night-soil processing facility in Tokyo. Around 100 tons of human waste arrives daily by tanker lorry from the last few pockets of the metropolis not connected to the sewer system. At this understandably anonymous facility, it is diluted with wastewater from the plant before being released into the sewers. We are not invited to inspect inside.
The bus departs in the afternoon for the Central Breakwater, an artificial island in Tokyo Bay. Located just south of Odaiba, the Central Breakwater is essentially a landfill containing 12 million tonnes of solid waste. It was completed and sealed in 1986, just as demand for new land in Tokyo was about to peak during Japan’s bubble era. We all know what happened next. The probably not untoxic Central Breakwater lay dormant and was eventually planted with a large forest in the early 2000s. Despite ongoing promises by the Metropolitan Government, Umi no Mori, as the forest is called, has yet to be opened to the public. It remains Tokyo’s most secret park.
There are some unusual sights on the Central Breakwater should you happen to go there on safari. There’s the Pulverisation Processing Plant for Large-Size Waste, a kind of mechanical lions’ enclosure where desks, mattresses and other large prey are thrashed at and tossed around by human-operated machines until they break into pieces small enough to be sent for, you guessed it, incineration.
The Central Breakwater was long ago eclipsed by its even larger neighbour to the south: the Outer Central Breakwater. Containing 55 million tonnes of waste and still being filled at its southern edge, the Outer Central Breakwater is a grassy and empty savannah, most of it built using the sandwich method of solid waste alternated with soil layers. When we drive past the scene of a small landslide, grisly plastic tongues can be seen lolling from a bank of lifeless soil. Welcome to the Anthropocene.
This is the last stop on the journey out into Tokyo Bay. In the distance is a low-lying pyramid, where heavy machines are working on an active landfill site. But the only waste being buried now is uniform-grey incinerator ash. Disposing of ash isn’t easy in a place as exposed as Tokyo Bay. It has an annoying habit of blowing away. A sound like a low hum of blades displacing soil and clay can be heard in the distance as machines drill the shafts where the ash will be buried underground.
Not all of Tokyo’s incinerator ash ends up buried. Some of it is diverted to companies which use it to manufacture paving blocks and other construction materials. Tokyo, it turns out, is metastasising in more ways than one: expanding its landmass with the advancement of waste into the bay, and finding new outlets for its waste in the approximately 10% of the city that has yet to join the ranks of the built environment, i.e. be covered with buildings or paved.
Beyond the Outer Central Breakwater lies something called the New Sea Surface Disposal Site. Here, underwater preparations are being made for another landfill. This involves compacting the sand on the sea floor and constructing dykes out of sand and stone. Later, steel plates will be driven into the ground and reservoirs constructed to catch run-off before it can contaminate Tokyo Bay. Even harmless-sounding ash can be assumed to contain toxins, metals, and whatever the hell else might be resistant to temperatures of 850°C. Incidentally, escaped waste from a landfill is called leachate, a name so disarmingly pretty that I find myself wondering if I could use a little more of it in my life.
The New Sea Surface Disposal Site will be Tokyo’s last landfill. Further land reclamation has been ruled out because it would block shipping lanes in Tokyo Bay. At the current rate, Tokyo will exhaust its landfill capacity by 2060, a date that causes existential dread in the slide decks of the Clean Authority of Tokyo. But the crisis is not all it seems. Tokyo will surely find other prefectures in Japan willing to take its waste, in the same way they provide it with energy. Imposing a burden is what Tokyo does. Tokyo’s last landfill may serve an unexpected purpose: as a port for exporting incinerator ash.
I suspect the real crisis lies with the Clean Authority of Tokyo itself, which is understandably attached to its brilliantly designed and self-contained ecosystem for managing waste. Like all bureaucratic entities, the Clean Authority is motivated by long-term self-preservation. It encourages Tokyoites to reuse and recycle. It recognises that part of its mission is to reduce waste. Only not too much, obviously, as that would disrupt the system.
Tokyo’s waste management system works. It can even be said to work wonders, recycling most of what it can while dealing responsibly with the rest. But that’s not to say it’s perfect. It’s a linear model of waste-in, waste-out. One of the barriers to building a circular economy is that large infrastructure projects are usually designed to last from 50 to 100 years. And in Japan, long-term plans tend to be carried out to their conclusion. Let’s just finish this landfill first, shall we, and then we’ll see about change.
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