By Peter Richards from Caribbean360

TOKYO, Japan, 2014, CMC – The Ariake Incineration Plant will probably have no major role to play in the construction of the Olympic Village for the 2020 Summer Olympics to be held in Japan.

Chances are however, it will have to deal with the waste that will be generated by the athletes during the Games of the XXXII from July 24 to August 9.

The Olympic Village will be constructed not far from the plant that has acknowledged its role is to reduce waste generation, reuse waste and to promote recycling waste as resources.

“We are not likely to have a major role in the construction of the Olympic Village but you never know the future,” said plant manager Hisakazu Nikaido.

He told Caribbean journalists during a visit to the plant that almost 40 per cent of the waste at the facility is biomass and that the facility accepts at least 100,000 tonnes of waste annually.

Waste is burnt in the incineration plant and becomes ash of the volume of about one twentieth, with officials saying this process contributes to prolonging the limit of disposal sites.

It is also utilizing the heat energy produced by the incinerators for generating electricity power, supplying steam and hot water to the waterfront area and neighbouring public facilities.

Nikaido said that the plant with a price tag of 41.7 billion yen (One Japanese Yen =US$0.008 cents) when it was constructed in 1995, receives at least one million US dollars annually in selling electricity.

“So in a sense we are earning our money,” said Nikaido, adding “we don’t have any complain about gas or waste water from citizens”.

Nikaido would not say whether or not his plant could be a model for Caribbean countries given the peculiarities of the regional states, but following the first ever Japan-CARICOM summit held in Trinidad and Tobago in July, Caribbean leaders said they hope to make use of Japanese technologies in fields such as renewable energy, energy saving and disaster risk reduction.

President of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JIICA), Dr. Akihiko Tanaka, said that Tokyo’s aid would be guided by the requests from developing countries.

“The major purpose of our facility is to contribute to the betterment of our partners and the tangible results that we would like to see is the betterment of the living standards and social and economic conditions of our partner countries,” he said of JICCA, which promotes itself as “the world’s largest bilateral development organization, operating in some 150 countries”.

“Our approach has long been emphasising the ownership and self help of our partners and our basic approach is what we call request principle, this is a principle to all countries of the world that we will not come forward and tell our partners this is what we are going to do in your country.

“What we would like to do is to ask you what you would want us to do and that is what we call the request principle, so I think with the Caribbean we are now in the process of having the request from the partner countries in the Caribbean, but that does not mean we are simply waiting,” Tanaka added.

The communiqué issued at the end of the one-day meeting between CARICOM Foreign Ministers and their Japanese counterpart, Fumio Kishida on November 15, noted that “bearing in mind that stable energy supply and clean energy, as well as Information Communication Technologies are key to economic development in CARICOM member states, they welcomed investment and interest by Japanese enterprises in such fields.

“They also recognised that it is important to improve the business environment including infrastructure, capacity building, and affiliated industries in order to enhance trade and investment,” the communiqué noted.

“We can learn so much from Japan,” said Jamaica’s Foreign Affairs Minister AJ Nicholson.

“You take the issue of energy, we do not in Jamaica have any oil and the like, so it means that to keep down our energy bill one of the things we have to do is conserve and I don’t think we have the discipline to do that,” he said, adding “and we asked them to help us inculcate that also into way of going forward”.

Last month, JIICA brought to Tokyo several Caribbean experts for a first hand view of several projects dealing with energy and disaster management.

The Caribbean experts would no doubt have been made aware of the Yokohama Smart City Project (YSCP), a social system demonstration project whose ultimate aim is the construction of Japanese-style smart grids and their spread in other countries.

“Yes we are hoping to develop projects not only for Japan, but to the rest of the world, including the Caribbean,” said Fumiki Natori of the Climate Change Policy Headquarters at the City of Yokohama.

Established in 2010, the YSCP’s mission is the verification of technology, mechanisms and business models for smart cities in the overall “FutureCity” project.

Ryou Nakano, the assistant manager at the Climate Change, Policy Headquarters, said Japan also suffers from global warming and as a result “in various ways global warming has been affecting our lives”.

He further warned that “if we do not take measures by 2030, we will see changes.”

The YSCP has undertaken several projects that involve collaboration between the city and numerous private sector enterprises including Tokyo Gas, Toshiba, Nissan Motor, Panasonic and Accenture.

These YSCP projects include renewable and yet unused forms of energy; energy management in homes; office buildings and next generation transport systems.

Natori said the plan is to reduce Carbon Dioxide by five per cent and reduce the electricity bills for consumers by at least 30 million yen annually,

As part of the initiative under the YSCP, home energy management systems (HEMS) were installed in nearly 4,200 households in Yokohama over the past four years.

“We are trying to invite more households into the project,” said Nakano with officials indicating that the overall objective is to assure a stable supply of power and reduce the total amount of CO2 emissions.

Earlier this year, a test, the largest of its kind so far in Japan, was conducted using about 3,500 of the HEMS to assess the ability to save energy.

The City of Yokohama said that the results of the study will be used to determine how households could save energy without difficulty and to build an effective saving model for diverse urban lifestyles.

It will also contribute to the establishment of flexible power tariff schemes promoted by the Japanese government to “control power demands without lowering the levels of comfort in living and to assure a stable supply of power in the community”.

IMAGE: ZAHA HADID’S NEW NATIONAL STADIUM IN JAPAN WILL HOST 2020 SUMMER OLYMPICS AND 2019 RUGBY WORLD CUP. (CREDIT: COMPLEX.COM)

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