The true cost of trade among neighbors: the role of Japanese imports in waste generation in China

Abstract

China’s rapid economic development has caused considerable environmental problems in waste generation and treatment. One important reason for this is China’s manufacturing exports to other countries such as Japan, a major trading partner. However, the contribution of such importing countries has not yet been fully explored. This study quantitatively examined how final demand in trade between China and Japan affects both countries’ economies and waste generation. The results show that imports of final consumption goods from China to Japan induced enormous waste generation in China, while the wastes induced in Japan were negligible. Even if final demand exports from China to Japan are significantly economically beneficial to China, the cost to China from addressing the induced waste generation seems too much to make these exports worthwhile. To encourage constructive discussions, improvement of reliability and transparency of waste statistics in China that allows comparison with other countries would be significant.

KEYWORDS:

• Waste input–output analysis
• emission embodied in trade
• inter-regional input-output table
• China
• Japan

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to Mr. Takazumi Sato who helped us with the data compilation. We wish to thank Mr. Lorenz from Forte Inc. for proofreading this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Environmental contamination, especially in the informal waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) sector, is very serious (Leung et al., 2006) and is one of the reasons why China promulgated WEEE regulation (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People’s Republic of China, 2009) and implemented a waste import ban in 2018 (Li, 2018).

2 We define the MRIO model in a broad sense and use the definitions for both the Isard model and the Chenery-Moses model. See Footnote 2 of Hasegawa et al. (2015) and Wiedmann et al. (2007).

3 We assumed that Japan also exported WEEE to China (Terazono et al., 2009; Terazono & Yoshida, 2012); however, due to limitations in the trade data available, distinguishing between second-hand electronic equipment and WEEE was difficult. We therefore did not attempt to evaluate the flow of WEEE in this study.

4 The other 29 sectors, E37-E39' to ‘U', are service industry sectors for which no statistical data is available in China. We therefore estimated the amount of waste generation using the Municipal Solid Waste model of Habara et al. (2002), as mentioned in Section 2.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (Grant No. 16K03648 and No. 23510051) and a Tokyo International University Grant for Special Research Projects for the year 2015. I am deeply grateful to Mr. Takazumi Sato who helped us with the data compilation. We wish to thank Mr. Lorenz from Forte Inc. for proofreading this manuscript.