Abe’s entrance, as well as his role in the video skit, was a pleasant surprise as it was an uncharacteristic thing for the po-faced leader to do.
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The Tokyo Olympics are four years away, but host nation Japan is already upping its environmental game.
Now, the government wants to double the sports industry by 2020 and triple it by 2025, making sports entertainment part of everyday life. The country only collects less than 100,000 tons of it. Japan typically uses the metals recovered from e-waste for creating new electronics.
A meeting was held on June 10 where Tokyo Olympics officials met with government members and representatives from a mobile phone company, precious metals company, and recycling companies.
A United Nations report from previous year said that China and the United States were the worst offenders when it comes to discarding electronics.
They will surely return to virtual competition when the Games hit Tokyo in summer 2020.
It said that Japan had acquired 143 kilograms of gold, 1,566 kilograms of silver and 1,112 tons of copper from its discarded electronics in 2014.
Despite the large number of disposed electronics and small appliances, Nikkei notes that less than 100,000 are collected under a system based on the country’s 2013 small home appliance recycling law.
Japan, like most countries, has laws created to stop discarded electronics ending up in landfill, with ambitious targets of 1kg per head per year cited. In comparison to the amount of materials that were used for the 2012 London Olympics, Japan should have more than enough metal.
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“If this public-private co-operation progresses, the collection of electronic waste should also progress”.
