Kamikatsu - a small town on Japan's Shikoku island - is showing the way to a zero waste community to the entire world. The town has been running a project to manage its waste in an eco-friendly way for many years now. It has already achieved significant success in this project. What's more, it promises to take this project to its logical conclusion, according to the Huffington Post.
The town has been running a waste recycling and management program for nearly 15 years now. The people of the town separate their waste into - not one or two or three categories - but all 34 categories of waste, according to the Atlantic's Citylab. Each of these kinds of waste are then further processed to ensure that the town is able to achieve the maximum degree of recycle and reuse of its goods. The program has been so successful that, today, nearly 80 percent of the town's waste is recycled. It plans to raise that percentage to 100 percent over the next five years.
The town was once a flourishing community of nearly 6,000 people. Today, its population has been reduced to around 1,700. During the last decade of the 20th century, the town was faced with the growing issue of how to manage its daily waste.
It first tried burning the waste in open fires and also used landfills. As the open fires it adopted were clearly found to be harmful, it wanted to invest in a fire incinerator to burn the waste. However, no sooner was the new incinerator built, it was discovered that the design and model of the new incinerator was already obsolete, and could therefore no longer be used, according to the World Economic Forum. It was when it had to confront such a crisis in waste management that the town took some truly decisive long-term decisions with the aim of being able to manage its waste in an eco-friendly way.
The town could well become an example for many communities that want to practice clean and sustainable waste recycling practices. The whole world will no doubt continue to watch how this project pans out over time. Even as it is, it has already generated enough interest for a number of people to look it up as a prospective model.
