An overview of residential food waste recycling initiatives in Japan

Climate change mitigation has become a focal point in governmental agendas across the world, including in Japan. As the amount of food waste produced is a big concern of Japanese authorities, this paper presents an overview of the local initiatives currently existing in Japan to foster household food waste recovery systems, highlighting their main differences and similarities in terms of system design and marketing strategy. Additionally, a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis on compost return systems, that are an endemic Japanese food recovering cycle is done. Japanese municipalities seem to always have some kind of residential food waste recycling system being advertised to their residents, being that a centralised, a decentralised, or a hybrid compost return system. Centralised segregation schemes are a rarer approach, with only few municipalities offering this type of food recycling setup. On the other hand, more than a half of the municipalities subsidises the households’ purchase of a composting technology. Hybrid solutions in which consumers compost and return the final output can be a compromise solution between centralised and decentralised schemes with possible positive spillover effects in other consumers’ pro-environmental behaviours. • Japan has a wide range of local initiatives for household food waste recycling. • Decentralised systems are the most commonly promoted approach among cities. • Marketing strategies like financial support or rewards were common across schemes. • In Japan there are a recycling system where citizens compost and return the output. • Such hybrid systems show growing interest and potential positive spillover effects.