Suchergebnisse

AbstractSeveral Japanese companies and the government are recently promoting a plastic ban and imposing a tax levy to curb litter and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This has led to a rapid rise of nonplastic packaging alternatives. While plastics and litter are pressing concerns, it is paramount to examine environmental risks of other alternatives before wide application and legislative action, to not further the risk of environmental damage. This study aims to quantify and compare plastic products such as polyethylene‐terephthalate (PET) bottles and high‐density polyethylene (HDPE) bags with widely available alternatives in Japan like glass bottles, aluminum bottles, paper bags, and textile bags, to find a product with the least environmental impact. A life cycle assessment is conducted from a cradle‐to‐grave environmental impact approach that includes raw material extraction, production, transportation, end‐of‐life treatment, and disposal. Sixteen impact categories including climate change, acidification, aquatic‐toxicity, so forth, and weighing is assessed using the MiLCA software. The functional unit is one piece of each packaging product, and impacts of product‐filling, storage, recycling, and reuse are excluded for a consistent comparison. HDPE bags performed better than paper and textile bags in 15 of the 16 analyzed impact categories. Similarly, PET bottles outperformed aluminum and glass bottles in 12 out of the 16 impact categories analyzed. Weighted results also highlight the heightened negative environmental impacts of replacing plastic packaging with widely available alternatives.

The causal structure of the determinants of trust in industry, government, and citizen's groups in Japan was investigated on the basis of Peters et al. (1997). A preliminary survey of the adequacy of the hypotheses proposed by Peters et al. in Japan was made. A set of hypothesized determinants of trust in Japan was proposed based on results of the preliminary survey. Questionnaires concerning perceptions of trust in the organizations and the proposed determinants were sent by mail to residents in the area where environmental risk problems had emerged. The data were analyzed by covariance structure analysis to construct models of trust in industry, government, and citizen's groups. As a result, "openness and honesty,""concern and care,""competence,""people's concern with risks," and "consensual values" were found to be factors directly determining trust. Suggested in particular is that "openness" of an organization is not attained merely by information disclosure, but also by bi‐directional communication with the people. Moreover, these models include "consensual values," which do not appear in the model proposed by Peters et al.