The Biomass Nippon Strategy was decided upon by the Japanese government at a cabinet meeting held in December, 2002. It is Japan's first national strategy to utilize biomass as a valuable resource, and is comprehensive in that it takes on viewpoints from the varied areas of technology, social and economic systems. This means that Japan has declared its decision to stop wasting precious resources. There are four basic reasons for adopting this strategy : Climate change prevention ; Development of a recycling-oriented society ; Incubation of new industries; and the activation of rural areas. Three types of goals have been set (technical, regional and national) with specific action plans for production, collection and transportation, conversion technologies, and stimulation of demand for energy or material uses. Through cooperation between several ministries, the im-plementation of the Strategy has been going on for the past one year, however there remain many challenges to be tackled including the high costs of using biomass and stimulating the demand for biomass products. Despite these hurdles, however, the utilization of biomass will continue to be an important policy issue in Japan.

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Biomass ethanol is a renewable fuel. Fuel biomass ethanol has the potential to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emitted from automobiles and boilers which run on fossil fuels such as gasoline and other heavy oils and therefore reduces the risk of global warming. CO₂ emission from the transportation and commercial sectors has increased drastically making it necessary to adopt effective measures to reduce emissions from both sectors. Biomass ethanol is blended into gasoline and is used as a motor fuel in the United States, Brazil, and other countries. A 10% ethanol blend (E 10) is available for conventional gasoline engines. This paper presents the benefits and importance of introducing fuel biomass ethanol into the fossil fuel system.

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At present, there are about 30 biogas plants operating on dairy farms throughout Hokkaido. Although their initial purpose was for manure treatment, energy production has become an important additional motivation for the building of biogas plants. Some minor problems exist with biogas systems, including desulfurization and low production at the onset of operation. With regard to extending the usage area throughout Japan, however, some major problems, such as utilization of biogas and digested slurry, still exist.
Assuming that the following conditions (such as legal policies) are put into place, the spread of biogas plants to farms all around Japan can be expected.
1. Legislative incentives for depollution caused by livestock waste.
2. Legislative incentives for buying electricity from regenerative energy sources.
3. Legislative incentives for management of organic waste.
4. Legislative incentives for the reduction of CO₂ emissions.

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In Japan, the annual amount of biological waste (waste biomass) reached approximately 280 million tons in the year 2000. This huge amount of waste biomass, coupled with the limited years remaining for landfill use, has caused a serious problem. With an aim to counter this problem and reduce the amount of landfill waste by 37, 500, 000 tons by the year 2010, the Japanese has proposed a new policy plan. In addition to extremely thorough recycling programs, it will also be necessary to work toward a reduction of waste-producing technologies in order to reach this ambitious target for landfill waste reduction. We have, therefore, carried out research on both material-and thermal-recycling of waste biomass using biotechnology. For the effective utilization of biomass, we considered properties of various biomass types were taken into consideration and a cascade (multi-stage) application was adopted. Although the individual technologies used are well known, development of an effective combination of these could be considered a significant new technology. For sustainable development to take root in Japan, technologies suited to the actual conditions of local regions must be secured, and a recycling-oriented society must be established through the use of not only thermal but also material recycling technologies. These efforts will enable Japan to contribute to regional development, as well as the prevention of global warming.

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Over 50% of the approximately twenty million tons of food waste generated annually in Japan comes from kitchens and the food industry and is a type of municipal food waste which is difficult to recycle. Here we propose a novel recycling system for municipal food waste which combines fermentation and chemical processes to produce recyclable plastics from high quality poly-L-lactic acid (PLLA) . The total design of the process allows for a high yield of PLLA with high optical activity and novel recycling of all materials produced at each step, with minimal emissions and energy-savings.
Evaluation of the system is discussed from the standpoints of energy balances, environmental impact, as well as sustainability of the industry, which are all important areas to consider for the establishment of a recycling-based society.

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