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The Yomiuri Shimbun

The aim of the inspection is to confirm whether the trash contains hospital waste, such as used syringes, as reported. If it does, police will try to track down the hospitals responsible for the illegal disposal. Shipment of hospital waste across national borders is banned by the Basel Convention, which regulates transnational transportation and disposal of hazardous waste.

If medical waste is discovered, the joint investigation squad will seek a warrant for the arrest of Hiromi Ito, the 49-year-old president of the waste disposal company based in Oyama, Tochigi Prefecture.

Nagano prefectural police are also seeking the whereabouts of Ito in connection with another alleged violation of the Wastes Disposal Law. The joint police team face a daunting taskIt has to inspect 122 containers of waste, totaling 2,700 tons, that the government was forced to transport back to Japan from Manila under the terms of the Basel Convention.

In addition to work at the Ota facility, inspections will start Thursday at facilities in Yokohama and Kawasaki. It will take the team of 600 inspectors up to 20 days to finish its unenviable job. When they have finished, the waste will be incinerated by the government instead of Nisso, which refused to comply with an order to collect and dispose of the waste in agreement with established guidelines.

About 1,200 tons of the waste was sent to the Ota facility. The first truckload arrived 945 a.m., and was greeted by about 50 inspectors from the Nagano and Tochigi prefectural police. When the truck's rear doors opened, 16 blocks of compacted waste wrapped in black vinyl sheeting could be seen. Each block measured about 1.5 cubic meters.

The blocks of waste were unloaded by a forklift onto the floor. One of them was transferred to the bed of another truck to be opened. At 1030 a.m., four investigators, dressed in white protective clothing, dust-proof masks, plastic gloves and goggles jumped onto the truck and tore open the black vinyl sheeting, exposing a whitish block of waste, bound with heavy wires.

The inspectors then fed the waste into five crushing machines. After the trash was crushed, intravenous drip tubes, soiled diapers and transparent plastic cylinders could be seen among the fragments of vinyl and plastic. The trash was then packed into plastic bags, that were placed by the forklift onto a 100 meters by 20 meters area of floor covered with vinyl sheeting.

Tokyo metropolitan government officials gave instructions using loudspeakers. Also present were officials from the central government. The crushing machines continued their noisy task of breaking up the waste blocks, and gradually the floor become covered in trash.

The inspectors picked up anything believed to be hospital waste piece-by-piece and threw it into categorized sections, while shouting information to each other for records that were being kept. According to a Health and Welfare Ministry official present at the inspection, about 10 percent of the trash seems to be hospital waste.