Abstract
In March 2003, “The Basic Plan for Establishing a Recycling-Based Society”was established in a cabinet decision. In accordance with a mandate by“The Basic Plan for Environment”which is precedent over this Plan, quantitative targets for material flow indicators and those for effort indicators were examined and eventually adopted. Recent progress in material flow studies at international level contributed to this process. The adopted material flow indicators put focus on three aspects of material flow around the economy : input, cyclic use, and output. The respective indicators are resource productivity, rate of reused and recycled materials to total inflows, and final disposal amounts of industrial and municipal solid wastes. A material flow model describing the relationship among key variables of the economy and material use, as well as structural decomposition analysis of resource productivity, were employed to determine the quantitative target levels of these indicators. A few other technical points are also discussed in the paper.
