About
Kamikatsu Town is located in the east edge of warm Shikoku Island, which has an influence from Black Stream flowing into the Kii Channel that faces Pacific Ocean. Although the town sits in steep terrain roughly ranging 100m and 1 400m of altitudes, it also contains rich folding land features, including terraced paddy fields— very small plow lands scattered creating stairs—along with the basins of deeply cut valleys.
The town represents one of the small villages of Japan with its population of less than 2 000. Since 1960, population has concentrated to urban cities in Japan resulting in some local governments, which lost much population, to suffer financial collapse. However, Kamikatsu Town has become popular with its original and continuous agendas for environment, and increasingly brought many observers into the town not only from home but also from abroad. The village was considered to be one of the most beautiful villages in Japan, and was admired for its high environment awareness—it attracts twice as many visitors as its local population for inspection on its environment strategy.
Strategy
Twenty first century is called “era of environment.” Everyone understands that the common challenge of human species is to build sustainable environment for every single life on the globe. Therefore, Kamikatsu Town set its long term goal in the twenty first century to build “sustainable community” based on its environment ethics. However, as this can not be achieved in a brief space of time, a wide variety of public activities is practiced. To carry out this goal, citizens’ full understanding and diligent but assured actions are considered necessary. Furthermore, Tokushima prefecture, including Kamikatsu Town, insists on “Zero-Waste Tokushima” in its environment policy, and aims to increase its recycling rate by 10 per cent, and to cut 32 per cent of its final amount of disposal by 2013. The CO2 emission will be reduced by 10 per cent in 2010, compared to the one in 1990.
1. Education based on environment ethics for mature citizens
Kamikatsu Town believes that healthy communities are developed by mature citizens who are given the opportunity required for qualified community edification and enlightenment. The town looks into raising awareness among each citizen about problems regarding depopulation and an aging society, and to build communities with secure local infrastructure, and sufficient job opportunity, as solutions to these issues. Concretely, in the town, they have organized “1Q activity committee,” in which each section of town competes with each other, to see how perfectly goals set by each section are achieved. In this initiative, citizens in sections are trained to be local leaders in order to foster mature human resource, which is often considered insufficient in small municipalities.
2. “Zero-waste declaration” aiming to reduce environmental burden
In order to become an environment conscious municipality in the town assembly on September 19th 2003, the town pledged as follows:
Declaration Statement - In order to inherit clean air, pure water and fertile soil for children in the future, Kamikatsu Town, hopes to waste no rubbish, and declares to become a zero-waste town, by 2020:
i. Kamikatsu Town will be educating citizens on environment awareness, to protect a clean globe.
ii. Kamikatsu Town will promote waste reusing and recycling, and make the best effort in no incineration and landfill disposal of waste by 2020.
iii. Kamikatsu Town will associate with many people all over the world, in order to improve their global environment together.
3. Challenging the new era of environment – Actions to prevent global warming –
The concrete examples of actions which have been currently taken are as follows:
- Reduction of incineration and landfill disposal by sorting garbage into 34 different types for best efficiency in waste management
- Reduction of CO2 emission by wide-spreading usage of boilers fueled with wooden chips
- Proposing to establish “act on resource recovery (provisional title)”
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