Ms. Sakano

People often ask me, “How did you get interested in waste?” but to be honest, I didn’t start out with an interest in waste. I first got passionate about protecting endangered wildlife species. I got into waste only later, when I was studying environmental policy and environmental law at university. “Rights of nature” means that animals and plant have rights too. I studied how to protect them using the law.

Ms. Sakano

In environmental policy, it is important to create laws, regulations, and systems, but putting them into effect can take a very long time, especially in Japan. When a new system is proposed, people tend to ask, “Is there a precedent for this?” So, I thought that a more useful way to accelerate environmental policy change might be to go somewhere where I could create a new system by trial and error, even if only on a limited scale. And I thought it would be good to do this in an area where something concrete was already being done.

Ms. Sakano

Around that time, a friend of mine from a town called Kamikatsu told me that the local community was working hard to reduce waste. So, I made several visits to the area during my university days. Eventually, I got involved with Zero Waste Academy, an NPO that had been working together with the Kamikatsu municipal government for years to implement a zero waste policy in the local community.

Ms. Sakano

Correct. The town had actually been separating waste into 34 categories since 2002. The decision to separate waste in so much detail had to do with the fact that burning off in fields had been banned nationwide. There was a lot of talk about the need to build incinerators and to manage waste more efficiently. Earlier, the town had even built its own small incinerators to eliminate the need for burning off in the fields, but due to some difficulty complying with dioxin regulations they were never ultimately used.

Ms. Sakano

After discussions, we decided that instead of investing money in incineration, it would make more financial sense to find a company to recycle the waste and to build a system to circulate the waste. We also thought that this approach was essential for the future of society. That was how we started the waste separation.

Ms. Sakano

We have relationships with several communities throughout Japan. Some with local governments, some with citizen groups, and in some cases with both sides. When I get a chance to get out in the field, I tend to do surveys of local waste management. The community I’m directly involved in is engaged in planning right now, but I will be taking part in projects starting this year.
Sometimes we work on formulating corporate strategies and on training people for that. Programs for companies can be easily offered online these days.

Ms. Sakano

The “4Ls” stand for local (community-driven), low impact (reducing environmental impacts), low technology (not relying on the latest technology), and low cost. It was Robin Murray, a British economist, who first put forward the idea of zero waste in the context of economic policy.

Kamikatsu is a perfect model for this. With community participation, the town was able to separate, collect, and efficiently recycle waste on a manageable scale, without needing to make a large capital investment. This is an example of how the concept is able to achieve good results.

The idea was significant because it came from an economist, but the impressive thing for me was that compared to the conventional approach to waste management, which is “let’s invest in large-scale incinerators,” the “4Ls” concept was more like, “if we do what we can, precisely and on a small, manageable scale, the results can be surprisingly inexpensive and highly effective.”

Ms. Sakano

Every January, the World Economic Forum holds its annual meeting, commonly known as the Davos forum. The co-chairs for each year’s meeting are selected to reflect the theme of the year’s forum and the message the WEF wants to convey. For example, in 2018 all the co-chairs were women. This seems to have been in response to the #MeToo movement, which came to global attention in the second half of 2017. The forum featured leading female executives, such as European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde, as well as female researchers.

Ms. Sakano

Because youth will be so vital for the future of the world, for the six co-chairs in my year they decided to select “Global Shapers below the age of 30,” choosing from the World Economic Forum’s “Global Shapers” community (one of the WEF’s three communities). I had been a member of the Global Shapers since 2012. I was probably invited to be a co-chair because I could touch on important topics such as sustainability, waste reduction, and resource recycling.

Ms. Sakano

Some were involved in education and others had been refugees. A good number of them were working on sustainability issues. It was around this time that the Davos forum began to focus on sustainability as one of its strongest themes.

Ms. Sakano

In its Global Risks Report, the WEF presents a list of the major risks the world is likely to face in the near future. In the report released in early 2020, environmental risks were among the top five risks. (See: https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2020)

Ms. Sakano

Climate action failure, extreme weather, biodiversity loss, natural disasters, and finally human-made environmental disasters. Ultimately, all of these problems are human-made, but some are more directly impacted by human activities than others.

Ms. Sakano

It is probably easier to talk about environmental challenges by dividing them into separate issues, but the truth is that waste and resource depletion are all closely connected to climate change. I’ve been talking about this connection a lot recently.
Personally, I am a bird lover, so I tend to approach environmental issues from the perspective of biodiversity conservation. So, lately, I’ve been thinking that it would be nice if I could one day connect my work to the theme of ecology.

Ms. Sakano

The so-called “bio” theme is getting a lot of attention. The Davos forum has provided many ways to distribute news and information about new technologies and new initiatives that the WEF wants people to know about. In the central area of the main hall at the Davos Forum in early 2020, there was an exhibition consisting exclusively of products derived from nature. The quality of the exhibits varied, but as an example, I noted some initiatives to create products using seaweed and new materials.