In Japan, it was the transportation equipment manufacturing industry that reported the most chemical releases for eight consecutive years 2001-2008. The reduction of hazardous chemicals released from the automobile manufacturers will contribute to the overall environmental risk reduction. In this study, by referring to the data given in 2008 by the Japanese Pollutant Release and Transfer Resisters (PRTR) and the US Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), the difference of released and transferred amounts of chemicals per vehicle from the automobile manufacturers of each country was studied, and the following were found: 1) the total amount of chemicals released and transferred in Japan was 2.9 kg/vehicle, which was 87% of that amount in the US, 2) the amount of chemicals released in Japan was 2.4 kg/vehicle, which was 6.0 times larger than that in the US, in particular the amounts of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and dioxins were remarkably large in Japan, 3) the total benzene-equivalent amount of carcinogens per vehicle released in Japan was 4.0 times larger than that in the US, particularly the amounts of dichloromethane were remarkably large in Japan. As far as we know, this is the first study that compared the total amounts of carcinogens released from Japanese and the US automobile manufacturers by assessing each carcinogen with its benzene-equivalent amount.

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The Tokyo Metropolitan Area is the largest urban area in the world. It is important to project the future distribution of population and land use in the area not only in terms of the urban planning, but also in terms of the mitigation and adaptation to climate change. This research studies spatially explicit high-resolution land use change scenarios in the metropolitan area with a newly developed land use model. In this study the microdistrict (cho-cho-moku) is used as the spatial analysis unit which allows realistic scenarios with fine spatial resolution to be constructed, whereas a traditional land use model is usually constructed at the municipality level. This study demonstrates two extreme scenarios—urban concentration (compact city) and dispersion for showing the maximum range of the future land use distribution. The projected land use distribution can be applied as the boundary condition for urban climate models, and also has a potential to provide useful information to urban practitioners. The developed scenarios provide the scenario dependent projections of parameters such as anthropogenic heat emission, vegetation cover, etc.

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A simulator was developed for a sequential process comprising from a tree felling process to a pellet distribution process to estimate cost and energy consumption of wood pellet production. Linear programming was used in the simulator to minimize the pellet production cost. An objective function of the pellet production cost was set to seek an optimal solution. In order to avoid influence of external economical factors such as timber demand and prices, an assumption was made in the algorism of the simulator as follows: all harvested trees will be utilized for a raw material of wood pellet, and no trees will be utilized as an industrial timber or pulp chip. The simulator was given default parameters, functions of pellet producing efficiency and information of energy demand and supply, which were obtained and summarized in our previous study. This is the first work to present a simulator for estimating cost and energy consumption of wood pellet production, which was developed for a sequential process comprising from a tree felling process to a pellet distribution process based on the forest management information.

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Wood pellet production cost was estimated by means of a simulator developed in our previous study. All thinned trees were assumed to have been utilized as raw materials for wood pellets, and no trees were assumed to have been utilized as industrial timber or pulp chips. The estimations were performed based on 14 different scenarios to study the possibility of creating a pellet-mass-consumption society in Japan. These scenarios were designed to vary pellet production scales in an objective area of Yakushima, an island (500 km² with 14,000 residents). The utilization cost was significantly affected by the pellet production scale, resulting in approximately 40 yen/kg at the production scale of ca. 2,000 t/y. The cost decreased according to the production scale and reached a minimum of 25.8 yen/kg at 26,500 t/y. Compared with the mean prices of kerosene (Feb. 2010) and LPG (Dec., 2009) in the country, the minimum pellet price was cost competitive though coefficients of performance decreased when the pellet fuel was used. The ratio of energy consumed for pellet production to lower heat of combustion (LHV) of the pellet was 0.0276 at 82,700 t/y.

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This paper analyses the current formation and effectiveness of the coalitions involved in the negotiation process of multilateral environmental agreements. This paper reviewed three cases, namely the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter (focusing on the amendments to the 1996 Protocol to regulate the sequestration of CO2 streams from CO2 capture processes in sub-seabed geological formations), and the UN Environment Programme Ad-hoc Open Ended Working Group for the international management of mercury.
In these three cases, the Like-Minded group for international mercury management was regarded as an effective coalition i) to help coalition members prioritize targets within that group for the negotiation and clarification of the detailed design of a possible mercury treaty; and ii) to lead the formal negotiation by clearly stating the priorities. In contrast, the groups that did not share similar interests or that followed past negotiation processes served only as information exchange opportunities among member countries and did not contribute to the process of negotiations. This further suggests the possibility of obstructing the advancement of the negotiations by wasting human and financial resources.

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Many local governments implemented their industrial waste taxes using the Omnibus Decentralization Act. This paper makes clear the effect of the taxes, by using the data published in the industrial waste reports of each prefecture. This paper analyzes the rate of change at the generation, the recycling, and the final disposal of the industrial waste. This paper uses two analysis methods: the Regression Analysis Method for the decreasing ratio of the final disposal and the Flow Analysis Method for the recycling ratio of intermediate treatment. The results of these analyses are as follows: Okayama Prefecture, a prefecture that enforced the industrial waste tax, had a decreasing ratio of the final disposal much larger than other prefectures. In Mie and Shiga Prefectures, cases in which the recycling ratio of the intermediate treatment was more than 90% were exempt from the waste tax on the intermediate treatment waste. Both prefectures had recycling ratios of the intermediate treatment over 90%.

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To uncover what is “the comfortable landscape”, it is necessary to study the effect of landscape factors on the amenity of human emotion. In this study, to establish a method to evaluate amenity of landscape regarding the cognitive characteristics in our human nature, the stress-releasing effect of river landscape was analyzed by various physiological indicators.
The stress level of 29 panels was measured by systolic and diastolic blood pressure, interval of heartbeat, skin temperature and secretory immunoglobulin A concentration in saliva indicating activities of sympathetic and parasympathetic nerve, through the experiment. In experiment, a sequence of a stress elevating stroop test following a slide show of landscape view with high or low naturality was repeated three times. For the slide show, two CG sets of high and low naturality controlled in a river-terrace covered with and without green grass were designed, respectively.
It is shown that there are significant differences between slide sets with high and low naturality in alterations of four physiological parameters except beat interval. The stress-releasing effect of high naturality CG set is higher than that of low naturality set. These results show the usefulness of physiological indicators in exploration of landscape elements affecting to the amenity.

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