• Waste management in Japan
• Circular economy in Japan
• Waste management in Asia
• Disaster waste management

Disaster waste management is costly

Disaster waste management (DWM) is expensive. The cost includes expenses for municipalities to subcontract various tasks such as transportation, treatment, and disposal of disaster waste, management of temporary storage sites, and environmental monitoring; rental cost for vehicles and machinery; and direct labor cost at worksites. In recent years, for example, it cost 19.6 billion yen for Mashiki Town, Kumamoto Prefecture to manage 340,000 tonnes of disaster waste after the 2016 earthquakes, and 79.9 billion yen for Sendai City to manage 2.72 million tonnes of disaster waste including tsunami sediments after the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami.

As these examples have shown, DWM operations after large-scale disasters have been implemented on a massive scale with the cost of tens of billions of yen. For some municipalities, this is more than their total annual expenditure at normal times on not only waste management but also other public services (e.g., social welfare, agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, and education). Their general revenue is not enough to cover all these expenses. Then, who bears the DWM cost?

DWM expenses are ultimately paid from tax money

As DWM cost often exceeds municipalities’ financial capacity, Japanese government has set up a nation-wide system to support municipal DWM operations. The main pillar of the system is “DWM Subsidy” scheme that is managed by the Ministry of the Environment. This funding scheme supports the municipalities affected by natural disasters or other unexpected incidents to implement collection, transportation, and treatment of disaster waste that are particularly necessary for protecting the living environment. The scheme subsidizes 50% of the total DWM cost. The remaining expenses are mostly paid from special local allocation tax (from the national budget), and thus the burden of municipalities is decreased to 10% of the total cost. If the national government designates the disaster as “a disaster of extreme severity,” affected municipalities will receive more significant financial support, and their burden will be minimized to a few percent of the total cost.

In order to receive the funding from the DWM Subsidy scheme, municipalities affected by the disasters must compile “DWM Report” to provide the basis for calculating and justifying the breakdown of DWM expenditures. For example, the report must present unit costs (e.g., transportation cost per 1km for the budget item, “collection/transportation cost”) and documentary evidence (e.g., daily reports and a copy of the subcontract services agreement for the budget item, “labor cost”) as the basis for calculation. The expenditures are subject to on-site inspections by Local Finance Bureau officials of the Ministry of Finance. If the reported expenses are neither justifiable nor eligible to be reimbursed from the subsidy scheme, the excluded expenses will be paid by the municipalities from other financial sources. In short, the national scheme provides financial assistance for disaster-stricken municipalities to ensure the effective implementation of DWM operations while also rigorously monitoring appropriate and efficient use of the subsidy.

We must recognize that DWM expenses are ultimately paid from our tax money regardless of whether it is national tax or local tax. What would happen if ordinary wastes (e.g., items not damaged by disasters) are brought to temporary storage sites after disasters? Someone must pay for the cost of managing them. Unless each of us fully cooperates with municipalities to properly manage disaster waste, such inappropriate actions would needlessly worsen the financial conditions of national and local governments.