The Intercommunity between Environmental Value and the Construction of a Recycling-Oriented Society

ABSTRACT

Due to a shortage of disposal landfills, environmental problems of waste management and recycling are becoming increasingly grave. The adverse impact of these issues on both the environment and economic activity is also alarming, and consensus building for environmental value is a rapidly developing field. In recent years, due to a flurry of recycling laws, the environmental value of recycling is being continually delineated. In actuality, however, environmental value based on a shared, comprehensive consensus by society as a whole has not yet been attained.

After analyzing recycling costs for businesses, an average of roughly 30 percent of costs for environmental measures are used for recycling related fields. When examined by business type, retail and construction companies have the highest percentage of recycling costs, while trading companies and electricity and gas utility companies tend to demonstrate the lowest percentage. Furthermore, though the average ratio of recycling costs per sales accounts for only 0.39 percent, the ratio for paper and pulp companies is as high as 2 to 3 percent. From the viewpoint of the cost-effectiveness of recycling activities, an average of only 60 percent of recycling costs showed direct results. However, due to the low number of companies that publish data regarding the benefits of recycling, as well as a number of cases in which companies are not sufficiently able to grasp the efficacy of their recycling, additional data collection is needed for a more detailed analysis.

Increasingly strict regulations regarding waste and recycling are one of the major causes of rising costs for businesses. The worsening of cost-effectiveness as a result of tougher regulations means that, in order to counteract these rising costs, a strategy is necessary for reducing costs and adjusting the efficacy of programs via acknowledging the previously unrecognized indirect benefits of recycling activities as constituting environmental value. To this end, it is necessary for businesses to recognize and manage internal indirect benefits of recycling as "internal environmental value", while at the same time society as a whole must provide compensation for "external environmental value" via environmental conservation and by mitigating economic growth restraints.

As methods of compensating for external environmental value associated with businesses' recycling activities, three possibilities are being considered: public subsidies for businesses, shifting costs to product prices, and burdens assigned according to business. One possible technique for providing incentive for the appropriate evaluation of environmental value calls for the construction of a point system for external environmental value, with products assigned points that are distributed through a recycling point system. However, before such a system could be implemented, a detailed examination of various related issues would be necessary, such as standards for point appraisal, who would manage the system, who would participate in the system, the convertibility of points, compliance with pertinent law systems, and criteria for overall assessment of the system's efficacy.