We conducted a social survey in the Japanese cities of Yokohama and Kitakyushu and classified citizens into groups regarding attitudes on climate change and developmental cooperation, identifying each group's state of support to international intercity cooperation for the environment. The survey not only collected relevant attitudinal data including attitudes on carbon crediting but provided the respondents with opportunities of carbon offsetting as remuneration to obtain real action data. The principle component analysis and cluster analysis show there are five groups in terms of preference of carbon crediting as well as interests in climate protection and international development. The group of global environment contributors, opposing carbon crediting, is most supportive of international intercity environmental cooperation while they are more active in climate protection in daily lives. This group may not support the city's obtaining credits by extending support of climate change mitigation projects in developing countries.

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The second phase of the Basic Plan for Establishing a Recycling-Based Society introduced the concept of sound material cycle (SMC) blocks, by means of which a material cycle of optimal size is created in accordance with the characteristics of a region and the properties of its circulative resources. Although SMC blocks are implemented to increase the rate of resource circulation in the whole country, many issues must be addressed before this aim can be realized. We sorted analogous wastes and circulative resources into groups, and established a decision theory to define the ultimate SMC blocks for the various groups. We found deviations between present conditions and optimized transport solutions solved by linear programming. The use of a gravity model to analyze other factors that impose constraints showed that the source population size had a significant impact on the quantities of packaging transported. Microanalysis showed that there is an optimal size of focus on disposal facilities.

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This study examines the relationship between patent invention for environment and corporate financial performance in Japanese manufacturing sector. We separate environmental patents groups as follows, (1) Pollution abatement technology, (2) Energy technology, (3) Products design and development technology. Dataset covers from 1965 to 1997 and we apply Poisson regression model. The result implies that economic performance have positive effect into the pollution abatement technology and products design and development technology. This is because high ROA firm can allocate enough budget to promote environmentally technology development, which might not contribute corporate productivity directly.

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To develop low-carbon societies, we should reduce energy consumption in all sectors. In Japan, fuel consumption by the food production and transportation sector is about 15%. In this study, we first investigated the self-supporting production of food in Tottori prefecture. The results showed that the requirements of most nutrients were met except for manganese and pantothenic acid. Second, we examined various strategies under the system of self-supporting production of food. It has been observed that energy consumption can be reduced by 10% when food is not imported. Moreover, about 30% of the energy consumption can be reduced by producing only those foods whose present production exceeds 2000 tonnes/year. Calculations of food production that requires the least amount of energy showed that a reduction of 50% is also possible.

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As soil or sludge contamination by PCBs has been an emergent issue in recent years, effective remediation technologies are strongly required. We have developed a combination process of thermal-desorption and steam-destruction applying to the PCB-contaminated soil remediation. In this method, pollutants are vaporized and removed by heating the contaminated soil in a thermal-desorption process, and the volatilized pollutants are destructed by reaction with H₂O in steam-destruction process. Main points of our results are as follows;
•In thermal desorption, the performance of desorption depends on temperature. Changing the temperature from 200°C to 400°C made big improvement of the performance.
•In steam destruction, temperature was one of the dominant parameters to decide the ability, whereas steam concentration had little impact on the performance.
•PCB concentrations of outlets both from thermal-desorption process and steam-destruction process were approximately in the same levels, as the results of various scales of experiments.

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