Japanese electronics found to pollute groundwater

[Doug Henwood]

>Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 10:12:57 -0700 (PDT)
>From: "Camp. for Responsible Technology" <svtc at igc.apc.org>
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Precedence: bulk
>Sender: owner-crt-list at igc.org
>Subject: Japanese electronics found to pollute groundwater
>To: crt-list at igc.org
>X-Sender: svtc at pop.igc.org
>
>The problem with groundwater pollution and the electronics industry is not
>limited to the United States as reported in the July 25 issue of The
>Economist.
>
>_____________________________________
>
>  The Economist
>                         July  25, 1998
>Pg. 60
>HEADLINE: Toxic waste in Japan. The burning issue
>    TOKYO
>    A PENCHANT for wrapping everything in plastic and then
>burning the rubbish indiscriminately has turned Japan into the
>dioxin centre of the world.  Dioxins, a highly toxic group of
>chemicals that are known to cause birth defects, skin disease
>and cancer, are produced when polyvinyl  chloride (PVC)  and
>other plastic waste is burned at temperatures below 700 degrees
>celsius.  So toxic is dioxin that a dose no bigger than a single
>grain of salt can kill a man.
>
>
>   A recent study by Nicholas Smith, from the Tokyo office of
>Jardine Fleming, a stockbroking firm, found that more than 100
>of the 1,500 or so incinerators in Japan failed to meet the
>country's (already lax) dioxin emissions criteria. Japanese law
>allows 80 billionths of a gram of dioxin per cubic metre of air-
>-800 times greater than typical standards in Western Europe and
>North America. Only eight incinerators in Japan actually meet
>the international norm. And one, in Hyogo, continues to spew out
>dioxin at 10,000 times the concentration allowed elsewhere.
>
>All that poison floating around in the air may pass
>unnoticed. But when it falls to earth and contaminates the soil
>and groundwater, it becomes harder to ignore. A wake-up call for
>Japanese industry--on the scale of the Love Canal incident in
>America in 1980--came in April when the soil surrounding an
>incinerator in Nosecho, a residential suburb north of Osaka, was
>found to contain a staggering 8,500 picograms of dioxin per gram
>of soil.  This has given Nosecho the unpleasant distinction of
>having the highest recorded dioxin concentration in the world.
>
>  The outcry over the toxic waste that contaminated the soil at
>Love Canal in New York state prodded the American Congress into
>establishing a trust fund (the "Superfund")--financed by a levy
>on the oil and chemical industries--to clean up such sites. In
>the same way, Nosecho has focused public anger on industrial
>
>polluters  in Japan. Rather than being hauled over the coals,
>sensible firms have started to publish ugly details about the
>frightening condition of some of their sites.
>
>   First to come clean was Toshiba. In early June, the
>electrical group reported illegally high levels of a carcinogen,
>trichlorethy-lene--an industrial cleaning agent that is believed
>to cause kidney and liver damage as well as cancer--in the
>groundwater beneath four of its domestic factories.  The company
>carried out on-site inspections of all its 25 plants in Japan
>after detecting trichlorethylene levels at 15,600 times the
>permitted level at a factory in Nagoya last October. Having
>found similar levels of the toxic waste outside the plant, the
>local government is checking the health of residents in the
>neighbourhood.
>
>   Next a consumer-electronics giant, Matsushita, reported
>harmful carcinogen levels in the groundwater beneath four of its
>factories in the Osaka area. The level of the cancer agent
>tetrachlorethylene--used for cleaning semiconductors--at one of
>the plants was 9,400 times the permissible limit. At another
>plant, in Hokkaido, the groundwater contamination was 5,200
>times the maximum. The company suspects that the groundwater
>beneath 80 of its 112 plants in Japan may be contaminated with
>harmful compounds.
>
>   Such findings have come to light more than a year after
>Japan's amended Water  Pollution  Prevention Act came into
>effect. But the recent rush to reveal all has been prompted as
>much by the "Nosecho effect" as by the retroactive nature of the
>legislation, which forces the original  polluter  to clean up an
>affected site.
>
>   Other forces are at work, too. Japanese manufacturers have
>been adopting the international ISO 14000 standard of
>environmental  good housekeeping faster than those of any other
>country. By February, some 730 industrial sites in Japan had
>become fully compliant, compared with 525 in Britain and a mere
>110 in America.
>
>   Half of the Japanese plants that have complied with the new
>ISO standard are in the electronics sector. Being top exporters,
>Japanese electronics firms have been understandably nervous
>about having their goods barred from countries that are
>signatories to the ISO 14000 agreement. To be awarded the ISO
>seal of approval means making fundamental changes in the way a
>plant is managed, with strict planning, implementing, checking
>and reporting systems put in place. It is these, as much as
>anything, that are encouraging Japanese firms to clean up their
>act.
>
>   All of which is creating a handy new line of business for
>Japan's  environmental -protection industry. Soil remediation in
>particular is seen as having huge potential. Kurita Water
>Industries, one of Japan's leading  environmental -engineering
>firms, started building its soil remediation skills over a
>decade ago. It has carried out more than 400 surveys and soil
>purification schemes to date. As for Japan's filthy
>incinerators, the remedial business could be even more
>promising. Jardine Fleming's Mr Smith reckons that rebuilding
>all the faulty incinerators in Japan could cost a whopping YEN
>9.2 trillion ($ 66 billion).
>
>   Many suspect that the opportunities currently being exploited
>by the clean-up industry in Japan are merely the tip of an
>iceberg. Now that two of the country's most respected industrial
>names, Toshiba and Matsushita, have voluntarily surveyed their
>sites for toxic problems--and gone public with their findings--
>many more Japanese companies are expected to follow suit. The
>pressure for them to do so is increasing as they shut old
>smokestack factories and redevelop the land for other uses.
>But the remedial work is not just required at big
>manufacturers. The Environment Agency of Japan points to the
>plethora of small plating shops as the country's worst offender
>in terms of toxic waste, followed (surprisingly) by dry-
>cleaners, hairdressers and public bath-houses. Big industries
>such as chemicals and electronics follow close behind. So far, only a
>fraction of the small backstreet offenders have had their land
>surveyed. There is still a lot of nasty stuff out there in the
>Japanese soil. And an awful lot of work will be needed to clean
>it up.
>LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
>LOAD-DATE: July 24, 1998
>