One person’s trash is another’s treasure.

The problem is determining the fine line between trash and treasure, and sorting through the trash to find the treasures.

In Minamata, the citizens, local government and businesspeople have reinterpreted this old adage in a quest to become Japan’s most environmentally conscious city. This means learning from its past industrial pollution to re-think how resources are produced, consumed, and recycled.

I believe the city’s most admirable effort has been to work with citizens to create a waste sorting system that is community-driven and –practiced. It involves sorting waste into 24 categories so that the various items can be easily recycled later. Certain items are collected on particulr days, and one day per month a set of recycling bins is delivered to neighborhoods, where household representatives bring waste to be sorted.

I admire this system because it forces everyone to remain in intimate contact with a purchase through a longer portion of its life cycle. In other words, because used items cannot be immediately thrown in the chute (such as in HDB flats in Singapore), people have to live with their waste, and thus live with their purchases. Consumption becomes an act of thinking through more than just the immediate use of an item, to the long-term washing, storing, and sorting of the item. Some waste is only collected once a month, so one needs to carefully wash and store a glass bottle (for instance) until collection day. Thus, people may think carefully before making purchases that will eventually inconvenience their lives as waste. The official who spoke with us at City Hall stressed that one major change in his purchases is that he no longer buys any PET bottles. They must be carefully washed, and they take up a lot of space in the house before they are collected. Therefore, they are best avoided.

Lecture at Minamata City Hall regarding its environmental efforts

The city’s other admirable shift has been its addition of a fourth R to the existing three R’s of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. Minamata also encourages “Refuse” – refusing items deemed unnecessary, like superfluous packaging and excess plastic bags. While this may make it difficult for some industries to survive due to shifting consumer consciousness, like all businesses, they are expected to evolve to fit consumer demands. In other words, one should not encourage wasteful behavior just to benefit plastic bag manufacturers. If people refuse plastic bags at checkout, manufacturers eventually will evolve to make something else.

Given this spirit of four R’s – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Refuse – Minamata has encouraged not only craftspeople who creatively re-tool waste into useful items, but also industries that turn waste into the raw materials for new goods.

One of the former is Mrs. Yoshimoto, the speaker at the Minamata Disease Museum, who recycles glass into useful objects and art pieces. One of the latter is Mr. Tanaka, President of Tanaka Shop (田中商店水俣営業所). His recycling center employs around 30 people and turns Minamata’s household waste into useful things, like glass bottles that can be re-used by beer and shochu manufacturers, or ground glass that can be incorporated into asphalt to make roads safer (they sparkle at night) and more permeable to moisture.

Mr. Tanaka explaining one of his many business ventures involving previously-designated "trash," which he turns into "treasures."

tour of the Tanaka facilities

We toured the Tanaka facility and saw how sake bottles are cleaned and inspected, before they can be returned to the bottling facilities. Mr. Tanaka also told us about a project in which wine bottles shipped from France and Germany are cleaned, refilled with sake, and returned to France and Germany. This saves disposing of the old bottles in landfills and manufacturing new bottles for the sake. Plus, it makes for a poetic loop of alcohol. It is feasible that the same bottles could endlessly run through this Europe-Japan cycle, holding wine-sake-wine-sake-wine…

Empty sake bottles before being cleaned inside and out

We enjoyed admiring the shapes and colors of the facility, relieving stress by smashing bottles (to be used in asphalt later), and listening to the refreshing perspective of Mr. Tanaka, who always stresses the business side of his venture. He is clearly not operating this business for the environment or because of a guilty conscious. He wants to make a profit, and he is constantly introducing new items to broaden the company’s reach.

Worker inspecting bottles for debris and cracks

Clear glass bottles with imperfections. They will be broken and used for many purposes.

Lynn sweeping up after smashing a bottle

It is my hope that our NUS students will be inspired to think about recycling not solely as an altruistic endeavor, but also as a potentially profitable one. This will make the adoption of new practices easier to envision and carry out. Maybe one day Singaporeans will also consider trash to be full of treasures ready to be found and utilized.

May 18 was an emotional day that began at the Minamata Disease Municipal Museum, where we joined over 200 middle school students from Saga Prefecture to listen to a survivor. Yoshinaga Yumiko was born in 1951, when mercury carried in the effluent from the Chisso factory was beginning to affect cats. She lived on the coast, near the site of the museum that now honors the disease victims. Her grandparents fished and her father worked at Chisso, so in a way she represents both sides of the tragedy – the factory and the fishing families whose livelihoods and lives were most directly impacted.

Yoshinaga Yumiko shares her story about Minamata Disease

Middle school students attending Mrs. Yoshinaga's talk

She was 3 years old when the disease was recognized in people, although no one yet knew the cause or who was to blame. The disease robbed her grandfather of his ability to speak, eat, and use the toilet by himself. He spent the final 9 years of his life at home in bed rest. Her father’s life with the disease ended more rapidly. When he first experienced symptoms like numbness in the lips and loss of some motor skills in his hands, he was admitted to the Chisso company hospital. While there he slowly recovered over the course of a year. However, when he was well enough to return home, the disease quickly returned with a vengeance. He died in a few months. Only later did doctors and family members realize that food was the vector. At the hospital he did not eat any seafood from the polluted bay; at home, doctors believed he would recover quickly by eating what he liked, so he ate the fish that eventually took his life. He had always fished on his way home from the factory and had eaten his fill of fish from the bay.

Mrs. Yoshinaga has virtually no memory of her father, and her feelings regarding Minamata and the Chisso factory are complicated by years of denial regarding the disease’s impact on her family. For decades she told no one that her father and grandfather had died from Minamata Disease, and she recalls shunning a cousin in public who was affected. People thought that those who suffered had been foolish enough to eat bad fish and were now receiving payment for their foolishness. Therefore, she didn’t even tell her husband before marriage, for fear she would suffer the same kind of discrimination as others from Minamata.

However, something changed for her some years ago. She decided the only way to end all discrimination about Minamata Disease was to stop denying its presence in her life. Today, she not only shares her stories with groups like this group of students, but like many others in Minamata, she has become a concerned environmental citizen. For her, this means designing and selling goods made entirely from recycled glass. Earlier this year she was awarded the distinction of 環境大臣 (kankyō daijin, environment minister).

Student representative thanks Mrs. Yoshinaga after the talk

Following her talk, a student representative thanked her for sharing her story. Of course, this was all carefully scripted with the previous assistance of the student’s teachers. She could not have known the nature of the talk in order to craft her thank you. Despite this small issue, the talk was helpful for NUS students to see how an individual can affect change in the world through a concern for the environment.