Improving the environmental consciousness of people was pointed out as one solution to sustainable development for environmental problems during the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro (1992). For this reason, environmental communication has been focused on worldwide as playing an important role in improvement of people's environmental consciousness. However, until now social surveys about the effects of environmental communications on the general public have shown that this communication may not be effective because this process is not understood by the information sender. Therefore, the effectiveness of environmental communication must be understood by the sender to effectively achieve the expected role and the effective way to do it. The purpose of this study was to quantitatively show the effectiveness of environmental communication, and to propose effective ways to improve people's consideration of environmental communication. We focused on one media, websites on WWW. Websites on WWW are one of 26 tools in ISO14063 for communication of international standards for environmental management. Social field surveys were conducted to measure changes in people's consciousness and grasp the situation of the collective consciousness. Firstly a preliminary survey was conducted, and then activities of gradual environmental communication carried out, surveys with the same style of questionnaire conducted 6 times, and finally the results were quantitatively evaluated by multivariate analyses. To quantitatively show the effectiveness of environmental communication through websites and field surveys, we examined three points. Firstly, “Changes in consciousness as affected by using the website” was examined. From the results of covariance analysis, changes in a subject's consciousness was much better after using websites than other kinds of environmental education such as in the classroom. Secondly, the “Ability of websites to function as a tool for environmental communication” was considered. Comparisons of each questionnaire by factor analysis clearly showed that environmental education through a website greatly affects not only environmental consciousness but also motivation for environmental activities. Third “Characteristics of website design that affect subject's consideration” were determined. The most important points affecting a subject's consideration was the visual impacts of coloring, positioning of photos, fitting of visual design and content. These results quantitatively show the effectiveness of environmental communication and we propose that the effectiveness of websites is sufficient as a tool to change people's considerations of environmental communication.

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The ability of the thermophilic denitrifying bacterium Geobacillus sp. strain TDN01, which can grow at 60°C, to denitrify municipal wastewater was tested. The wastewater was nitrified using a nitrifying bacteria mixture at 25-30°C. This nitrified municipal wastewater included 7.9 mM nitrate, but no nitrite. Strain TDN01 was added to this nitrified wastewater and various treatment conditions were tested. Strain TDN01 requires an organic carbon source for denitrification, but it showed sufficient denitrification activity on adding non-treated municipal wastewater to nitrified municipal wastewater. After the denitrification process using strain TDN01, neither nitrate nor ammonia were detected (<1μM). This strain can also reduce nitrite, so the complete oxidation of ammonia to nitrate before the denitrification process was not necessary.

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In preparation for establishing a practical municipal solid waste (MSW) disposal plan, we constructed a MSW treatment model based on life cycle assessment, and factored in quantitative public preferences.
The study area was Ishikawa Prefecture. The objective functions of the MSW optimization model were minimal cost for government and municipalities, and maximal utility function for residents. The result for cost minimization showed a wide-area treatment system using stoker furnaces was least expensive. The result for maximal utility function favored a separating disposal treatment system (composting garbage) that emits less carbon dioxide. However, in consideration of the fact that it is difficult to use compost made from MSW due to reasons of quality preservation and keeping up with demand, we conducted an additional analysis excluding the separating disposal treatment system. The result for maximum utility when the separating disposal treatment system was excluded suggested a wide-area treatment system using stoker furnaces was favored. In addition, we proposed a feasibility plan based on the current waste treatment system. The results show the proposed MSW management system could reduce total costs and carbon dioxide emissions by 26% and 13%, respectively.

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Some parts of nitrogen applied to arable land are directly emitted to the atmosphere as nitrous oxide (N₂O) gas, which is produced by nitrification and denitrification processes in the topsoil (direct N₂O emission). In addition, super-saturated dissolved N₂O in drainage water, originated from nitrogen leaching, is secondary emitted after discharging to the ground water (indirect N₂O emission). During pluvial autumn (two months), we measured N₂O emission through drainage water from timothy sward in a lysimeter experiment, where anaerobically digested cattle slurry had been applied. The amount of indirect N₂O emission was significantly related to that of direct N₂O emission and nitrogen leaching. It was suggested that management producing high nitrogen uptake by crop will suppress both indirect and direct N₂O emission as well as nitrate leaching from arable land, although the experiment through a whole year is required.

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