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ED-Com: Japanese TRI system
I posting on this list in early April referenced a toxin reporting bill before
the Japanese Diet. The bill has been passed into law and I thought members of
this list might be interested in the following piece outlining challenges to
implementation of the law in Japan. The article appeared in the Nikkei Weekly,
the Japanese equivalent of the Wall Street Journal.
- Rhonda Schlangen
> __________________________________________________________
>
>
> NIKKEI WEEKLY, April 5 1999, p. 15
>
> Effective Pollution Control System Rests on
> Transparency, Public Access to Data
>
> by Jacob Park
>
> Fueled by growing public concerns about dioxin and
> hormone-disrupting compounds, the Japanese government recently signed
> into law that requires companies to report the release of chemicals
> and pollutants into the environment. Known in the U.S. as the toxic
> release inventory and internationally as the pollutant release and
> transfer register (PRTR), the proposed environmental information
> management system is one of the most ambitious legislation passed
> by the Japanese government in recent years and is likely to have an
> important impact on the business practices of Japanese companies.
>
> The PRTR system requires Japanese companies and industries
> (that release large quantities of pollutants) to report the emissions
> of 200 - 300 chemicals and industrial byproducts, including dioxin
> and a number of suspected hormone-disrupting compounds to the
> relevant ministries (e.g. drug companies will submit the PRTR
> information to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, airlines to the
> Ministry of Transportation, and so forth).
>
> The data will then be forwarded to the Ministry of International
> Trade and Industry and the Environment Agency, who will compile and
> tabulate the information according to industry types and localities.
> The public, upon request, will be able to receive emissions data on
> specific factories and companies can petition the relevant government
> ministry to block the release of certain information if the
> disclosure raises intellectual property concerns.
>
> Though the Japanese government should receive some credit for
> launching this important environmental legislation, a critical
> distinction has to be made between initiating something and
> operationalizing a complex information system that has to balance the
> information needs of citizens and the confidentiality concerns of
> companies.
>
> It will also not be cheap to oversee such a complex public sector
> program. As the basis of comparison, the US Environment
> Protection Agency is expected to spend $20 million this year on the
> toxic release inventory program and $145 million on a wide
> assortment of programs designed to increase the citizen's "right to
> know" about environmental pollutants.
>
> While there will obviously be costs with implementing and complying
> with this program, one should not overlook the opportunities in
> source reduction and pollution prevention that is likely to accompany
> the adoption of a PRTR system. Claudia Fenerol, a PRTR administrator
> at the OECD, argues that the pollutant registry system offers new
> opportunities for Japanese companies to engage the public
> environmentally and to provide concerned citizens an understanding
> of the environmental claims made by companies.
>
> Once it is fully implemented and multi-year emissions records
> are available, the PRTR system is going to transform the green
> business practices of Japanese companies by giving them an
> opportunity to differentiate themselves ecologically from their
> competitors. It may one day be possible, for instance, to know which
> Japanese electronic manufacturing firm is the greenest in its
> industrial sector and know which (and how much) chemicals are emitted
> from a certain factory by logging onto an Internet World Wide
> Website.
>
> To see what the Japanese PRTR system may look like in the future,
> one may wish to log onto the US Environmental Protection Agency's
> Envirofacts Warehouse Website
> (http://www.epa.gov/enviro/html/sitemap.html), where it is possible
> to download a wealth of information related to chemicals, pollutants,
> and waste discharges.
>
> By emphasizing the value of zero emissions, the PRTR may
> also accelerate the diffusion of environmental technologies like the
> virtual prototyping system in which advanced computers are used
> to simulate the manufacturing process and thereby minimizing the
> release of environmental pollutants.
>
> The PRTR system may also encourage Japanese companies to seek
> environmental productivity in all phases of their business operations
> - from raw material procurement to customer management - with the
> goal of creating what Burton Hamner, adjunct professor of corporate
> environmental management at the Asian Institute of Management, calls
> the "sustainable value chain".
>
> In many ways, the adoption of the PRTR system signals
> is the truimph of a global ethos of transparency at the expense of
> insular business practices that have been eroding the competitiveness
> of Japanese companies for many years. Due to advances in
> communication technologies and the growing popularity of foreign
> direct investments, many Japanese companies are discovering
> first-hand that transparency and information democracy are critical
> components of a "global" organizational culture.
>
> It may only be a coincidence that the new accounting rules
> establishing the consolidated balance sheet requirement (thus forcing
> the disclosure of off-balance sheet liabilities) and the PRTR
> legislation are set to start two weeks of each other. But, both
> off-balance sheet liabilities and pollutants illustrate one important
> lesson in this age of transparency: what you don't know can hurt you.
>
> __________________________________________________________
>
> Jacob Park (jpark@bss2.umd.edu) is a Washington D.C.-based
> environmental analyst. This article is excerpted from a working
> paper to be published by the Japan Industry and Management of
> Technology Program, IC2 Institute at the University of Texas,
> Austin.
>
>
>
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