Plasmas On The Streets Of Japan

Another article, discussing the concept of quality and total product lifecycles and producer responsibility.

Like everything else – like health, like famine relief, like national security – the ethical impulse to minimise our waste must be rendered sensible in business terms before it can be understood to be practical in any other way. The liveliest new thinking in relation to rubbish is therefore about the great financial benefit recycling brings – there are profits to be had, and this is understood to be a motor of change. The concept was essentially invented by the Japanese, by companies such as Toshiba, who invented a system of ‘total quality management’ whereby the manufacturing process would build in the possibility of zero defects. Many Japanese companies are now working on an understanding that their processes will suffer only one defect per million. ‘Transferred to the arena of municipal waste,’ said Stephen Tindale of Greenpeace,

Zero Waste forces attention onto the whole life cycle of products. Zero Waste encompasses producer responsibility, ecodesign, waste reduction, reuse and recycling, all within a single framework. It breaks away from the inflexibility of incinerator-centred systems and offers a new policy framework capable of transforming current linear production and disposal processes into “smart” systems that utilise the resources in municipal waste and generate jobs and wealth for local economies.

Lastly, in Japan, they just leave things out in the streets when they bore of them. A TV, music center, refrigerator and washing machine just put out on the streets. The cost of upgrading electronic goods is not only price but space. There are fees for recycling. Putting the item in the street saves the person a trip and a fee for a recycling sticker. Most goods are in good working order just a bit dated. There are even plasma TVs waiting to be picked up!

What a standard of living we have achieved, when toddlers have their own ipods, and plasmas are left on the street.

Now what?