For Japanese, Dioxin Is a Burning Issue

Noriko Matsuo is afraid to keep breast-feeding her baby.

“To think that dioxin might be flowing out of me to her is horrible,” Matsuo said as her 1-year-old squirmed on her lap. She also wonders if it’s safe to let her 3-year-old play in the local sandbox while 38 incinerators within a 2 1/2-mile radius are spewing dioxin-laden smoke into the atmosphere of this leafy bedroom community.

Her friend Takayo Tsuneoka investigates the provenance of all of her produce--and won’t buy a single vegetable grown here in Tokorozawa, a city of 396,000 about 16 miles northwest of Tokyo. “There are so many smokestacks along the highway that when you drive through at night, you see white smoke everywhere,” Tsuneoka said. “It’s probably psychological, but it gives me a headache just looking at it.”

Both mothers have begun thinking about eventually moving out of Tokorozawa in the wake of reports that the city and environs are among the most dioxin-contaminated places in Japan because of the heavy concentration of incinerators. Overall, Japan’s dioxin pollution is far worse than in any other industrialized nation, according to environmental specialists.

Japan is in the grip of a dioxin scare. The past several months have brought almost daily revelations of elevated levels of dioxin in breast milk, some cow’s milk, and soil and air around incinerators--sometimes in areas far from industrial Tokyo and Osaka that residents had thought were pristine.

Dioxin, which is among the most toxic of all manufactured chemicals, is a byproduct of some industrial processes and also is generated when plastics are burned at low temperatures. Recognized as a major public health hazard in the U.S. in the mid-1970s, it is known to produce skin disease, muscle dysfunction, nervous system disorders and birth defects, and has also been linked to cancer.

Although Japanese authorities insist that the contamination levels do not pose an immediate health threat, media coverage--even in ordinarily circumspect publications and TV programs--has been alarmist.

Media Alert Populace to Toxic Dangers

“Babies at Risk!” declared the headline on a story written by a physician in the monthly magazine This Is Yomiuri. “Dioxin in Milk: High Concentrations Found Near Incinerators,” said the lead story in the influential Asahi Shimbun daily.

Hiroshi Kume, the plain-speaking TV anchor who is Japan’s answer to Walter Cronkite, gave viewers the bad news straight up. At the end of a report on contamination in Tokorozawa, Kume declared, “It is correct to say that when it comes to dioxin, Japan is the most contaminated country in the world.”

Last Tuesday, a Tokorozawa citizens group filed a lawsuit against the mayor, alleging criminal violation of the pollution laws, a pattern of resident health problems including extremely high incidences of allergies and asthma, and a city cover-up of frightening environmental data. (A city spokesman had no comment on the lawsuit.)

Japanese data on dioxin pollution are sketchy, but surveys indicate that airborne dioxin here is vastly worse than in the United States. The average concentration of airborne dioxin in residential neighborhoods near industrial areas is about 1 picogram per cubic meter, according to the Japanese Environment Agency. (A picogram [pg] is a trillionth of a gram.) By contrast, in U.S. urban areas, it typically ranges from 0.01 to 0.1 pg per cubic meter, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data show.

The main culprits in this contamination are, first, the Japanese penchant for plastics, which are used to package and then bag--and sometimes bag a second time--nearly every retail item in this country; and, second, a propensity for burning garbage.

Japan discards 156 pounds of plastic per capita per year, according to the Plastic Disposal Promotion Assn. Japanese are supposed to segregate their trash, but plenty of plastic ends up being burned in small incinerators that are often close to residential neighborhoods and that do not achieve high enough temperatures to destroy dioxin.

Japan burns 74% of its garbage at 1,854 incinerators nationwide, while the United States burns only 15% of its waste at 148 facilities, according to Shinichi Sakai of Kyoto University. The U.S. sends 62% of its trash to landfills, compared with just 15% in land-poor Japan.

Nevertheless, Japan did not adopt an emission standard for dioxin until 1990. And although the standards for incinerators were made much tougher this year--and will become more stringent over the next five years--environmentalists charge that the rules are still dangerously lax.

“Even five years from now, our emissions limits will still be 10 to 100 times higher than the European standards,” said Kazuki Kumamoto, an expert in the public policy of waste disposal at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. “Japan is a developing country when it comes to safety, environment and health. The priority . . . has been to strengthen industry, and the government dislikes any action that could damage producers.”

For example, the Japanese Health and Welfare Ministry’s limit adopted in 1996 for acceptable daily intake of dioxin is 10 picograms per kilogram of body weight per day. The German standard is 1 pg; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standard is 0.01; and the California standard is 0.007, according to Japan’s Environment Agency data.

Government action has been slow partly because of a dearth of reliable data about dioxin and because of the cost of testing for a pollutant present in such minute quantities. (Testing one sample can cost $7,500, said Yasuyuki Hata, chief of the Health Ministry’s waste management section.)

Faced with a national anxiety attack, however, the government has embarked on a crash research program to study contamination levels and the possible health effects of dioxin as well as other “environmental hormones.” These are chemicals that mimic the action of human hormones and are suspected of disrupting health and reproduction in a variety of species, including humans.

Expert Urges Country to Stop Burning Trash

Anecdotal reports of falling sperm counts in men worldwide, as well as deformities and reproductive problems in fish and other species, have sparked international concerns about these chemicals. Last week, for the first time, Japanese authorities announced that they will begin monitoring and establishing emissions standards for environmental hormones.

The only long-term solution, Kumamoto said, is to stop burning garbage, because even high-temperature incineration leaves toxic ash that eventually will make its way into water supplies. But the government will not even consider such a step, he said.

For many Japanese homemakers--the people who have long formed the backbone of environmental movements--it is the discovery of dioxin in breast milk that has been most unnerving.

Contamination of Breast Milk

Contaminated breast milk is a global problem. Because human milk is fatty, and dioxin tends to concentrate in fat, breast milk contains much higher concentrations of dioxin than do other foods.

In fact, Japanese breast milk contamination is at roughly the same levels as in Britain and Germany--although the 1995 Japanese average of 26.6 pg is much higher than the 17 pg figure recorded in Los Angeles, Japan’s Environment Agency data show.

Moreover, dioxin in breast milk has actually been declining since the first samples were taken in Osaka in 1973, the Health Ministry’s Tomoko Kitashima said.

Nevertheless, the public, apparently unaware of the earlier data, was shocked by the newspaper reports.

Although she noted that the average breast-fed Japanese infant is getting six times the Health Ministry’s daily recommendation of breast milk, Kitashima said experts say the benefits of breast-feeding outweigh the risks. “Everyone knows that dioxin is bad and we must work to reduce it,” she said. “But in order to reduce it, we have to deal with the garbage problem.”

Dioxin expert Hideaki Miyata argues that the government is much too sanguine, noting that the standards do not differentiate between safe intake levels for adults and for newborns, whose brains and organs are still developing. Moreover, babies whose mothers have elevated levels of dioxin in their breast milk were probably also exposed to the toxin in the womb--a potentially dangerous double dose.

Miyata recommends that pregnant and lactating women take steps to reduce their dioxin exposure, including avoiding species of fish that swim near shore and are known to have higher contamination levels. The Tokorozawa mothers said they had never heard such advice--and wished that their government or their obstetricians had told them. Dioxin levels in breast-milk fat were found to be slightly higher in Tokorozawa mothers than in women in other areas of Japan.

“Dioxin could affect our children and grandchildren, so if they have any information at all about what might affect [exposure], they should tell us immediately,” Matsuo said.

Tsuneoka weaned her baby at six months after hearing about the breast milk contamination in Tokorozawa. Now she wishes authorities would replace the topsoil in the city’s Aviation Park.

“The sandbox is clean because they’ve replaced it, but the level of contamination in the soil is high enough that they would [be required to] remove it and replace it in Germany,” she said. “But my child plays there.”

Matsuo and Tsuneoka believe that the local government withheld information about the extent of the dioxin problem for years--and are skeptical about the accuracy of the information that’s now being released.

Whatever their past track record, city officials have snapped into action. They’re patrolling incinerators to ensure that they meet emissions standards, shutting down small incinerators at schools and requiring residents to separate their garbage into six categories--including two kinds of plastic--to make sure hazardous substances won’t be burned. Sloppy sorters don’t get their garbage picked up.

The city has also renewed its periodic request to its bureaucratic masters in Saitama prefecture to do something about the 15 smoke-billowing incinerators in the neighboring town of Kunugiyama. Windy days bring toxic smoke from industrial waste-burning facilities in Kunugiyama into residential areas of Tokorozawa--forcing Tsuneoka to keep her toddler indoors.

As usual, the city hasn’t received an answer.

Chiaki Kitada of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.