Abstract
Recently, it has become popular that firms success economically by utilizing environmental element as a tool in the society. A social trend called environmental modernization has pushed such a movement. However, it does not seem easy to realize a project that wasted ceramic dishes are collected and transformed into new dishes in the factory. There is nowhere such a project has ever been tried in the world. It is needed that one directional commodity flow from the producers to the consumers should be conversed into the mutual direction. A new process of collection and reproduction is added to the ordinal capitalistic system connecting production and consumption via distributing, and this will drastically change the relationship between human and ceramic goods. It is the beginning of new age that design means not only the coloring and figuring of dishes but also the re-building of the relationship between human and ceramics.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the re-production system of ceramics using recycled resources. This system was built in Mino production region located in the southern Gifu prefecture. The project started in 1997, in order to advance, had to resolve the problems such as technological difficulty, the networking of collecting wasted dishes, and the production and sale of recycled dishes. This study clarifies how producers and distributers behave in the production site and how consumers and community groups perform so as to solve such tasks. It may seem that the building of ceramic production system using recycled resource is a kind of compliant movement adjusting environmental boom. But, it is a superficial viewpoint. It should be pointed out that this system has a possibility to strengthen the international price competition of domestic industry and to review the social relationship between human and ceramic goods.
