This Japanese Incineration Plant was built in the 1980s to tackle the city’s increasing waste, as well as to promote environmental awareness and conservation. In Japan, where land is a scarce resource, just 1 percent of council waste ends up in landfills.
The heat from this plant was also used to warm nearby pools and the facility generates enough electricity to power itself and sells excess capacity back into the grid. By the 2000s the plant sat largely rotting and abandoned, too expensive to tear down.
In Japan, discarded waste is sorted into categories, one of which is incinerated waste. I burn it in special factories, of which there are a lot in the country. They burn practically “to zero” by filtering emissions, so that such factories can literally be located in the center. There are different generations of similar factories, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, from the outside, they look very much like a boiler room. Take a look at the layout in the lobby.
The administrative part of the plant has been rearranged by several rooms. I was surprised by the office of the director of the plant, which contained only a safe and a roll of toilet paper. In another office, a diagram of the entire technical process is displayed.
