Why Japan still doesn't sort its food waste — twenty years of the Food Recycling Act

The agriculture ministry's estimate for fiscal 2024 puts the food industry's total generation of food waste at 14,634 thousand tonnes and its recycling-and-recovery rate at 91%. By sector: food manufacturing 98%, food retail 65%, food wholesale 63%, food service 35%. The previous year the overall figure was 90%, and the year before that 89% — a slow, steady climb. A new basic policy published in March 2025 sets targets for fiscal 2029 of 95% for manufacturing, 75% for wholesale, 65% for retail and 50% for food service; manufacturing and retail have already reached their lines. Taken on its own terms this is a genuine achievement, and most countries do not even hold a comparable figure to be placed beside it.

The question is what the statistic counts. Its denominator is food waste arising from food-related businesses; not one gram from a domestic kitchen is in it. Japan's food loss for fiscal 2023 was estimated at about 4.64 million tonnes, split almost evenly between households at 2.33 million and businesses at 2.31 million. On roughly half of the country's food loss, in other words, the 91% says nothing at all. And 'food waste etc.' is a broader category than food loss, taking in the large volumes of inherently inedible matter — vegetable trim, fish frames — that processing produces by design. Most of what sits inside the 91% is material that leaves a factory on a schedule, dry, uniform in character and in bulk. As a physical object it has almost nothing in common with the contents of a kitchen bin.

The Act on Promotion of Recycling and Related Activities for the Treatment of Cyclical Food Resources — the Food Recycling Act — was enacted in 2000 as Act No. 116 and took effect in May 2001. Its addressees are 'food-related businesses': manufacturers, processors, wholesalers, retailers and operators serving meals, restaurants foremost among them. The machinery sets a priority order — prevent, recycle, recover heat, reduce — then requires periodic reporting from any operator generating 100 tonnes or more of food waste a year, with recommendation, publication and finally an order available where efforts fall conspicuously short. Obligations restricted to businesses; reporting demanded of the larger ones. It is a straightforward design, and it has produced results.

The flip side of that straightforwardness is where household scraps sit. Domestic food waste is municipal solid waste under the Waste Management Act, and responsibility for handling it rests with the municipality. The Food Recycling Act neither obliges municipalities to collect food waste separately nor asks them to compost it. Japan therefore runs two unconnected regimes over the same material. One has reporting duties, numerical targets and an annual published rate. The other has the individual judgement of some seventeen hundred local authorities. The French and Chinese stumbles in yesterday's instalment were failures of mandates that did not move material; for Japanese household scraps there is no mandate to fail. The country has spent a quarter of a century at the stage before stumbling.