The Incinerator

One of the cool things about living on a small island is having a self-contained water and sewer system (yes, my hometown of Anacortes, Washington defies this by pumping their water through a 36" pipeline that travels beneath two bodies of water to reach the island). Our waste system on Zamami is also mostly self-contained.

The incinerator is the center of much public controversy. It was apparently modeled after (and built by the same company) an incinerator half its size on nearby Tonaki Island. The controversy is three-fold, as far as I can tell: First, the incinerator was built on the most beautiful and famous beach in the Kerama Islands chain (see picture below). Second, the incinerator is huge and is designed to burn far more trash than our tiny community can produce. And third, the incinerator was (is) really expensive to build and is a big reason our village is the poorest in Okinawa and one of the five poorest in the entire nation of Japan.

We separate our trash into plastics, paper, metals, glass, non-combustible, and maybe some more categories I don't know about. I'm still not sure I'm separating my trash correctly, but as long as I have metals and non-combustibles separated out I'm fine. That's because everything else gets burned. There is no plastic or paper recycling, even though the rest of Okinawa recycles. Even two tiny little islands a few hundred kilometers east of the mainland send their recyclables in by boat. Our boat travels back to Naha empty, but we can't send our recyclables because they are needed as fuel for the incinerator.

I am told by reliable sources that the cost of operating the incinerator is in excess of $10,000/day. Since our community doesn't produce much trash, we accumulate it for an entire year at the incinerator and then spend one week burning it. Heating up the incinerator is an energy-intensive process fueled by coal and maintaining that heat is key to 'efficiency' so that is why our plastics are burned.

Since our incinerator gets so little use, it's apparently deteriorating much quicker than it should. During our week of burning in September, I was told the incinerator broke down, which means a costly maintenance trip has to be booked through the company that built it.

Japan is known to be one of the leading countries when it comes to incinerating trash and this is mostly attributed to limited space for landfills. Zamami is a big enough island, but thankfully(?) there isn't a landfill as any runoff would flow straight to the ocean and our coral reefs. Unfortunately, incinerators are a huge polluter of particulate matter, heavy metals, and dioxins (BAD) into the air. Fortunately our winds blow all of that stuff toward Naha.