City of Itoshima Promoting Household Composting to Encourage a Zero-Waste Society

The Japan Agricultural Cooperatives (JA) Itoshima Agri shop in the city of Itoshima, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan, has been selling a compost kit packaged in a cardboard box labeled "Sutenanna-kun," which means "Please, don't throw away" in Japanese, since September 2007, with the aim of recycling raw organic waste from households into fertilizer. The amount of garbage in the city has been decreasing ever since, despite its rise in population.

The Sutenanna-kun kit, which comes in a specially designed 40-liter cardboard box, includes a culture medium made up of 25 kinds of materials, including bamboo chips, diatomite, and beer yeast, as well as "bokashi," a unique fertilizer used for bio-processing composting made from organic waste collected from hotel restaurants in the neighboring city of Fukuoka. After the organic waste is carefully sorted, microbes are added for rapid fermentation to make the bokashi.

Each compost kit is priced at 880 yen (about U.S.$9.60), but the city offers purchasers a subsidy of 400 yen per kit. JA and the city have been promoting the system through seminars and other activities. The shop collects the compost if residents cannot use it themselves. Through these initiatives, the amount of burnable garbage in fiscal 2008 was 425 tons less than the previous year, a decrease by 342 tons in the first half of fiscal 2009 compared to the same period the previous year.

Shopkeeper Mr. Kotou, at JA's Itoshima Agri shop, who developed the system, said in an interview, "I would like to realize a sustainable society and contribute to environmental preservation by spreading the use of this simple system."

Ongoing Efforts in Japan Target Household Food Waste (Related JFS article)
http://www.japanfs.org/en/pages/025845.html

Posted: 2010/04/30 06:00:15 AM