Hello everyone. This is Takayuki Kondo. We invited government officials and university professors from Malaysia at our International Recycling Education Center (IREC) and provided automobile recycling training for them for one month from November 6th, 2017.
This training is a part of the projects of the Look East Policy 2.0, the national strategy agreed between Prime Minister Abe and Malaysian government, and long-term project over three years. The first participants of this training totaled 9 people from the Ministry of Transportation, Ministry of the Environment, Ministry of Capacity Development, Malaysian Automobile Research Institute, and local universities.
The Malaysian government promotes personnel exchanges of government officials, private sector engineers, and students through the Look East Policy, enhances knowledge and expertise on science and technology by leaning from Japanese best practices, and aims to achieve a goal toward a high-income country. Japan also aims to incorporate Asian growth into own economic development by encouraging collaboration among private enterprises through technology transfer and exchanges of know-how.
In Malaysia, more than 19 million end-of-life vehicles have been abandoned, and enforcement of an automobile recycling law, related tax system, and governance system like Japan is becoming an urgent task.
In the training, the trainee visited “Teshima” which is an island floating in the Seto Inland Sea and a negative legacy of Japan. Teshima used to be an island surrounded by rich nature. However, in the 1980s, an incident occurred in which a large amount of industrial waste (including automobile shredder dust) was dumped by a landowner. This incident triggered the Automobile Recycling Law in Japan, but it took 14 years and cost more than 79 billion Japanese Yen to treat 900,000 tons of waste and soil contamination.
In order not to repeat such a negative experience in Malaysia, we created an action plan for the automobile recycling administration in Malaysia up to 2020 as the output of this training. In the future, follow-up for legislation involving various stakeholders is necessary. We will make efforts to spread automobile recycling to more countries as a sustainable business.