• Sustainable waste management
• Drastic reduction of environmental burdens and resource saving

We consume enormous amount of resources and energy everyday for manufacturing and transporting products, and consume them in our daily lives.After that, one person throw out 1.1 kg of garbage on average each day, and waste from domestic factories and construction sites reaches 400 million tons a year.These wastes often contain valuable materials. Some have even greater amount of resources than ores in a mine.On the other hand, waste also brings about annoying problems.
Issues of emission of dioxin from garbage incineration plant, difficulty of procuring final disposal site, depletion of natural resources and energy, and greenhouse warming are becoming more and more seriousthese days.In order to overcome these problems, therefore, it is strongly expected to establish a recyclable society that minimize the environmental burdens and maximize the efficiency of finite resources and energy.
We, the waste metabolic system group, undertake several research activities that help to establish a recyclable society.The most ideal waste management system on which we study is that all processes of waste treatment are done in one area-based society as much as possible.That means to collect waste materials with careful regards to the waste types and regional characteristics, extract valuable materials using various technologies and little energy, incinerate residue, recover heat, and dispose only the properly treated waste in the final disposal site.In order to properly control the residue that are thrown outside of the area-based society, we also study on the establishment of holonic society system that has autonomous quality conversion system and transportation system, which will encourage the harmonization and moderate cooperation with other area-based societies.