City-Level Decoupling-Case Studies

CITY-LEVEL DECOUPLING: URBAN RESOURCE FLOWS AND THE GOVERNANCE OF INFRASTRUCTURE TRANSITIONS

In the early 1990s, Kitakyushu’s mayor started thinking about the city’s next challenge: how to combine environmental policy with industry. This coincided with discussions on how to make best use of its Hibiki landfill site. Study groups were held within the city administration, incorporating not only the environment department, but also calling upon the economic department. The 1990s saw the enactment of basic legal frameworks for recycling and resource management in Japan, including the Recycling Law (1991), Container and Packaging Recycling Law (1995), and the Electric Household Appliance Recycling Law (1998). Together, they established an obligation for industries, governments and consumers to reduce material usage, thus creating a market for recycling technologies. Companies like Nippon Steel were also looking for new business areas as global competition pressured heavy industries to promote rationalization and efficiency. Environment- friendly industries were identified as a key area of opportunity, and stakeholders from industry, research institutions and government joined forces to create the Kitakyushu Environmental Industry Promotion Council. When the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and the Ministry of Welfare set forth their Eco-Town Initiative aiming for the creation of zero resource emitting societies through the strengthening of recycling industries in 1997, Kitakyushu was ready to put its ideas into action. Upon starting, many companies took advantage of MITI’s Eco-Town grant. Grants were provided for research to inform planning and engagement with citizens, as well as constructing infrastructure for new companies. There are two main zones within Kitakyushu’s Eco-Town: the Practical Research Area where industry, academia and local government institutions conduct research and development in waste treatment and recycling technologies, and the Comprehensive Environmental Industrial Complex where newly developed technologies are brought to market. Inside the Comprehensive Environmental Industrial Complex is the Hibiki Recycling Area, where the city provides business sites for long term leasing to enable small and medium-sized enterprises to venture into environment-related industries. Kitakyushu Eco-Town is characterized by a strong collaboration between government, industry and academia. Situated close to the Eco-Town is the Kitakyushu Science and Research Park, where universities and research institutions themed around 'the environment' and 'information' generate new research and build human resources. Universities in the Kitakyushu Science and Research Park received support from the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture’s subsidy for pioneering academic institutions. Kitakyushu’s answer to waste management was to create a system whereby energy and materials are flexibly shared by individual enterprises in different industry sectors. Taking advantage of the fact that the Eco-Town is a gathering of different recycling and reuse factories, residue from one factory is in turn used as material at a different factory. Unusable industrial wastes discarded from enterprises within the Eco-Town (mainly residual substances from recycling and automobile shredder dust) are sent to the complex core facility, where they are processed by melting. In this treatment process, molten material is recycled as slag and metals and the power generated during

53