I belong to a cement manufacturing company, and am therefore one of the ringleaders of environmental destruction that has been caused by the mining of resources that go into cement, and so I know quite a lot about mining around the world. I would like to say, however, that I am not here to make accusations directed at the mining industry. Accusations generally have little effect. Mined resources are indispensable for the support of our industrialized society, and somebody has to mine them. So, the most important issues are how to reduce the impacts of resource mining and how to provide the resources without having to take them out of the ground. That is, I think we can say that global environmental issues are resource issues, and I also think that they are fundamentally issues pertaining to civilization itself. Today I'd like to address issues related to the resources that support industrialized society.

The environmental issues that are entwined with resource issues are exceedingly important ones. Now, in the twenty-first century, we are the first generation of humans to directly face the limitations of our planet. Up until now, we have been moving one-way towards an unlimited horizon, but now we are coming face to face with limits. The environment is often talked about as if it were a sub-system of the economy. Environmental problems are considered one field within the global economy. However, isn't it the other way around? Isn't the economy a sub-system within the finite global environment? A Copernican-style thought revolution is being called for by Lester R. Brown, former president (now Chairman of the Board) of the World Watch Institute in the United States. In his book, "Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth" he writes that the time has come for us to consider the economy as a sub-system of the environment. All schools of economic thought since the Industrial Revolution have completely ignored the fact that the environment and resources are finite, and indeed they continue to ignore this, which is really very surprising. That is, this is a problem pertaining to civilization itself. What I want to emphasize is that these are problems forthcoming from our resource-plundering civilization.

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To extract 1 kg of gold, 1,360 tons of waste

Now I would like to turn to Japan and address the situation in quantified, detailed terms. Looking at Japan's material balance for 1997, we see that its annual resource investment was about 2 billion tons of material, and the amount of end waste material conveyed to final disposal sites was 80 million tons. Back in 2000, the lifespan of Japan's ordinary waste disposal sites was estimated to be another 6-7 years, and that of industrial disposal sites was estimated to be 1.6 years. So, what is going on now? Illegal dumping is a problem that is escalating and rapidly getting out of hand.

Incidentally, of that 2 billion tons of resources invested, 600 million tons were imported from overseas. Coal, iron ore, gold, silver, copper, aluminum, petroleum - these were purchased as resources, consumed as energy or used in the manufacture of goods. Of these 2 billion tons, 400 million tons were discarded as waste, though 200 million tons were recycled.

When we address environmental issues, there is a lot of talk about creating a "recycling society." Japan even has a "Basic Law for Establishing a Recycling-Oriented Society." However, you are badly mistaken if you think that a recycling society can be created just by recycling or reusing end-of-pipe products. This approach fails to comprehend the meaning of the huge burden placed on the global environment in the countries where these resources are produced and exported. Recycling just within Japan is not a solution. We are apt to deal with environmental problems at the end point of the process that created them. But, doesn't real recycling mean something different than that? When we start onto this topic, we are getting into a discussion of comparative civilizations, and I do not want to get into that, but what I want to emphasize here is that before Japan inputs these resources, [their extraction] creates immense burdens on the global environment, and this needs to be included in any concept of recycling.

For example, what are the actual numbers for gold, which I mentioned earlier? Even if we discount environmental impacts such as forest destruction and pollution of air, water, and soil, destruction of ecology and just look only at how much waste material is produced, the fact is that 1,360 tons of waste are produced for every kilogram of gold extracted. That is, you have to dig up 1.36 million tons of earth and rock in order to get a ton of gold. When it comes to Japan in the form of gold ore, for every kilogram of gold, only 2 kilograms of waste material are produced. This means that smelting in Japan is a green industry because of the admirable way it cleanly manages and recycles its wastes, in fact, it is the most environment-friendly industry in the world. Looking at the domestic Japanese side of it, that is certainly so. However, this rather overlooks what goes on in the country of origin. This is exceedingly significant. I will speak again later about "ecological rucksack;" what we need to think about is how much ecological rucksack we are carrying.

Copper is relatively more concentrated than gold, so to get one ton of copper, from 1,898 tons to about 2,000 tons of waste material is produced, depending on the mine. Copper smelting in Japan produces only about 2 tons of waste material per ton of copper.

In the case of iron, for every ton of steel, only 5.35 tons of waste is produced, not very much. Iron is a high-quality mineral, and so there is not much difference between what is mined and what is brought to Japan.

Various industrial goods are made from various types of resources, but basic figures for the weight of the ecological rucksack carried by various products have been calculated jointly by E.U. von Wiezsäcker of the Wuppertal Institute of Germany and F. Schmidt-Bleek of the Factor 10 Club. This horizontal axis shows a log scale of total world production. The figure shown for world coal production is 3 billion tons, and the ecological rucksack (environmental destruction) that goes with that indicates that 6 times as much material must be dug up to yield this amount. World production of gold and platinum only amounts to a few tons per year, but this imposes an environmental burden 350,000 times that. For copper, it is 7,500 tons.

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From 1 ton of cell phones, 280 grams of gold - from 1 ton of mined material, 0.3~5 grams

For an example, let's look at cell phones. My guess is that about 70 million cell phones are now in use. Each cell phone contains about 0.028 grams of gold. I believe a cell phone now weighs less than 100 grams, but if we assume that 10,000 used cell phones will make up one ton of waste material, they will altogether contain 280 grams of gold. However, as I mentioned earlier, when resources are mined from under the earth, the largest scale, lowest quality ore contains only 0.3 to 5 grams of gold [per ton]. The amount of gold we can get from a ton of used cell phones is 280 grams. They also contain about 140 grams of platinum and palladium. As for copper, ores that contain only 500 grams per ton are still being mined, but a ton of used cell phones contains 140 kilograms.

The same goes for personal computers. Looking at both desktop and laptop computers, a desktop computer contains 0.42 grams of gold and a laptop 0.28 grams. Similarly, a desktop contains about 0.04 g of palladium and a laptop 0.03 grams, which are very large amounts. We in the industry call these minerals "surface resources." Big cities are mines. We do not need to mine resources from under the surface any more, because there are sufficient surface resources, and so both non-ferrous refining companies and precious metal companies are actively developing the needed technologies, and I think this is a wonderful thing.

What kind of elements are being used in IT devices? For example, condensers, other types of insulating materials and related components utilize almost every element in the periodic table. When IT devices are discarded and these become waste materials, they are all scattered. Some of them are very dangerous toxic materials, and cause soil contamination. Some people say that the global environment will be saved through IT, but I don't think so! I am sure that the three digitalized and interacting technologies of computers, communications and content have been incorporated by all industries and have a future of unlimited evolution, but aren't the issues I have raised here being ignored? Also, fiber optics, silicon chips and solar cells all use immense amounts of energy - a thousand times more than aluminum smelting, ten thousand times more than iron smelting. Most people are unaware of this.

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Increasing resource productivity by creating an industrial habitat

The last issue I would like to address is the need to increase resource productivity. We may be forced to call for change in our industrialized society, our consumer culture, our civilization of plunder, but achieving change is not so easy. And just to call for change is not enough. What we need to do is achieve a huge jump in resource productivity. When we speak of productivity, we normally think of labor productivity, or the productivity of capital. Everywhere people are striving hard to increase this kind of productivity, but not many are trying to increase the productivity of resources. This is because of the mere illusion that all we need is money in order to purchase the resources from anywhere in the world. But, when we think of resource depletion, of the control the major oil companies have over important global resources, and of pollution of the global environment by those resources, it becomes clear that we need to achieve a huge jump in resource productivity. It is even being said that if the advanced industrialized nations can achieve resource productivity ten times present levels, this will solve the North-South divide.

It will not do to keep on ignoring resource productivity and assume that it will be all right just to eliminate waste materials and achieve end-of-pipe zero emissions. All this really means is that some other company is being commissioned to deal with the wastes that are still being produced. It is not at the exit but at the entrance that we need to squeeze. And, we need to switch from underground resources to above-ground resources. We have already dug enough up out of the ground, so let's slow down on that end of it, and increase resource productivity. This is why we need to be sensitive to eco-design when we are manufacturing industrial goods. We have to keep these things in mind right from the design stage.

But, while we pander to the end user and ignore resource productivity in order to satisfy the chimerical goal of end-user convenience and the unlimited desire for possessions, we are unable to solve environmental problems, and will never be able to free ourselves from our civilization of plunder. This is why we must engage in eco-design.

There is a lot of talk about the problems of vertical organization in Japan's central government bureaucracy, but all of Japanese society is vertically organized. Not only the central government, but academia is also vertically organized. Rather than speak of vertical organizations, it might be more descriptive to speak of octopus-pot-type isolation! In the various industries as well, even if there is a way to immediately solve an environmental problem by horizontal cross-sector cooperation, in the present context of vertical organization, each industry, each company tries to deal with the issue by itself, so the problem remains resistant to solution. One effective problem-solving method involves the creation of a habitat for industries. We are destroying natural habitats though industrial activity, so I think it is time for us to try to create separate habitats for industry that are independent of natural habitats, in which the waste materials of each industry serve as fuel and resources for the others [as in a natural habitat].

In Japan nowadays there is a lot of talk about a recycling society, in which the product supply industries are compared to arteries and the waste management industries to veins, but it is meaningless just to talk about such things. Labor productivity is marvelously high in the "arterial" industries, and large-scale manufacturers utilize assembly lines to make individual products such as computers or other electric appliances. But, have any of you ever seen what happens when a device such as a computer is discarded, collected and taken apart to be consigned to the waste stream? It is all done by hand, each bolt removed one by one. Even with goods made by the same manufacturer, if it is a different type of appliance or model, everything about it is different, from the structure on up, and so hand labor must be relied on in order to take it apart. On the one hand we have mass production and mass consumption. On the other hand, the mass waste stream must be dealt with using hand labor. This is too much of an imbalance between "artery" product supply and "vein" waste treatment. If we apply the analogy of the human body's circulatory system, if a balance is not struck between the arteries and veins, then the system cannot function properly. In spite of this, policies do not exist to enlarge the "veins" of waste treatment. Only the productivity of labor and capital in the supply "arteries" are going up, while the waste "veins" are ignored. "Oh, well, somebody will do something about it. Sooner or later technology will fix it, " is the attitude.

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The Twenty-first Century - Age of "Eco-facturing"

I think we need to quickly shift out of the "producing goods" paradigm. We need to stop producing goods just to chase the endless goal of convenience and satisfy the desire for possessions and stop mass production/ mass consumption. In this connection, together with a colleague of mine, I've come up with the concept of "eco-facturing," and we are now applying to register this term as a trademark in the United States, Europe and China. The 20th century was the age of manufacturing, that is, the so-called age of productive industry. It is true that manufacturing businesses supported the prosperity of the 20th century in a context of mass production, mass consumption and mass waste, but in the 21st century we have reached the limit, and that approach can no longer succeed. That is why, even in producing the same goods, I think we need to do so through "eco-facturing."

"Eco-facturing" is an abstract term, but we are thinking about creating evaluation criteria to define it quantitatively and numerically, with the cooperation of 9 companies from different industrial sectors and Hitotsubashi University. We can call production eco-facturing when we are not simply making something and selling it, but when we are putting functions to use and selling those functions. It is not creating something and transferring it to someone's possession; all you need to do is make business by marketing functions. This can be through rentals, leasing, car sharing or what have you, there are many ways to do this. A well-known carpeting maker in the United States (Interface Corporation) has made a new start, declaring, "We no longer make carpets. We sell their function," and this is attracting attention from all over the world. Among the audience today, I doubt that any of you feel that you want to own an electric washing machine or stereo. These things are no longer objects of the desire for possessions, and I think this is the direction for the changes we need to make in the way things are manufactured and utilized. I believe that this could lead to a change in civilization as well.

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Forming global contracts for labor, human rights and the environment

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) is an organization with its headquarters in Geneva in which about 150 companies from around the world participate. Most of the top companies in the world have joined, and what the council is saying is that to achieve sustainable development, companies must show a good performance on the "triple bottom line." What is the triple bottom line? Normally, the bottom line for corporate activity means the final calculation of profits after taxes. Even if a company does well just on this kind of bottom line, unless it also makes contributions to the society and the environment, that company is somehow lacking in value, so [the WBCSD] is promoting the concept that companies must make efforts to achieve a balanced performance on the triple bottom line [ - business, society, and environment - ] and has launched activities on a global scale.

About 20 companies from Japan have joined and have started taking action. Several industrial sectors, such as the mining, automobile, paper and cement industries, have gathered together companies in the same sector from around the world to form working groups, which are discussing how to conduct their businesses in a sustainable way. They have included consultants and are listening to the opinions of NGOs and other stakeholders in preparing their reports. The cement industry report was recently completed. This is the kind of thing that we are doing.

Meanwhile, at the January 1999 Davos World Economic Forum, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan made a speech proposing a global agreement that would bring corporations and United Nations headquarters together. This is what is now called the "Global Compact." Without a major effort by industrial sectors and corporations to attain sustainable development, poverty cannot be eradicated, and poverty is the cause of a great deal of environmental destruction. With this in mind, the Secretary-General called on each corporation to enter into a compact with the United Nations based on four fundamental principles that would address the need for global corporations advancing into developing nations or nations suffering from poverty to pay heed to the three key areas of labor, human rights and environment and four principles. A considerable number of corporations have agreed to this compact, though only a few Japanese companies have joined so far. However, it seems clear that in order to eradicate world poverty and solve global environmental problems, efforts by NGOs and governments alone will not suffice. It's obvious that the various industrial sectors and corporations will have to make a sincere commitment to give a good triple-bottom-line performance in pursuit of sustainable development, otherwise global environmental problems cannot be solved. This was Secretary-General Annan's, with which I wholeheartedly agree.

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Internalize environmental costs to eliminate the North-South divide

The prices paid for resources imported not only by Japan but by all developed industrialized countries include almost none of the environmental costs. All are externalized as non-economic costs and ignored. This is the problem. So, if we suggest imposing environmental taxes, such as import or export duties that attempt to recover environmental costs at the border, then we run into World Trade Organization (WTO) issues. These WTO issues lie at the root of this problem. If a country attempts to deal with an environmental problem by imposing regulations such as an environmental tax, claims are immediately filed that this is an obstacle to free trade. Originally, at the Uruguay Round in 1992 when the WTO was created, it was agreed that a committee on human rights and the environment would be set up and these issues included, but to this day, that committee has not been convened even once. This is why human rights and environment critics stage boycotts at Seattle, and so on.

This is why change must be achieved in how we manage the economy and free trade. It is not just a matter of increasing productivity. Rather, it seems to me that we need to create an economy in which we raise [resource] productivity here [in the developed nations] and avoid unnecessary mining, while purchasing appropriate amounts from developing countries at higher prices that allow them to reap a profit. So, I think the ones we should attack are economists that do not pay sufficient attention to the finite nature of resources and the environment.

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Making Yakushima Island a hydrogen supply base

If we do not change our present plundering civilization, I think it will be close to impossible to change our economic system. However, I think there is an awareness gap about the fact that the planet's limits are closing in. Although there are fewer people who continue to contend that economy and environment are not compatible, they are still in the majority. However, they are compatible. In fact, I think that the present situation provides a tremendous chance to do business. This is what I am now trying to do in Yakushima Island [south of Kyushu.] Yakushima gets about 8,000 millimeters of rainfall annually. In view of this, our company is pursuing hydroelectricity generation that can supply the whole island, with enough left over for us to manufacture a material called carbonized silicon. However, at present hydropower provides only about 200,000 kilowatts of electricity, so there is still room for development. With full development of wind, wave, and solar electricity generation potential, the island could become a hydrogen supply base. Trial calculations of all energy sources show that the island could function as an energy supply base able to provide enough hydrogen to power, for example, 150,000 - 160,000 hydrogen fuel cell automobiles. This is what Iceland and the UK are now attempting. This was reported on the left-hand side of the front page of the Nikkei Shimbun yesterday (28 May 2002) - I hope you will all take a look at this article.

The global environment has already reached its limits. Tadahiro Mitsuhashi, Professor of Chiba University of Commerce, notes that ours is the first generation of humans to directly face these limits, and global warming and degradation of the global environment are certainly progressing at a precipitous rate. There is desertification, water is scarce, groundwater levels are dropping lower and lower. We will reach a dead end first with water issues. Then will come food shortages. Some say that our discussions of security will shift from problems of war to problems of food security. Because a thousand tons of water are needed to grow one ton of grain, presently in North Africa and the Mid-east grain imports have suddenly increased. This is because they have insufficient water.

Precious water supplies are going for drinking water, industrial use and so on, and so there is no way they can spare the thousand tons of water needed to grow one ton of grain. Thus, they are rapidly switching over to imports from the United States and elsewhere. Looking at China also, it will also sooner or later become a food-importing nation - as I expect some of you may know, it already imports coal and iron ore.

In any event, changes are occurring at a frightening pace. How you perceive this will depend on whether you hear it as fact or as the ravings of an environmentalist, but the discussion of whether or not economy and environment can be made compatible is an old one that has been going on for ten years or more, and I am not going to enter into that discussion now.

Reference text: "Shigen-saikutsu kara Kankyou-mondai wo Kangaeru - Shigen-saisei no Takai Keizai-shakai ni Mukete," United Nations University Zero Emissions Forum Booklet (Kaishou Press) (Environmental Issues Considered from the Standpoint of Resource Mining - Towards a High Resource Productivity Society/Economy)

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