The Challenge and Vision of Food-system in the Recycling-based Society

Generally speaking, the 21st century belongs to environmental era. As we talk about environmental issues, the recycling-based society which has a friendly and simple message is often used as a keyword. The recycling-based society is a new word that created early 1990's and has been used widely after the Japanese Government enacted the Basic Law for Building the Zero-Waste Society in 2000.The direction of the recycling-based society is to promote a Zero-Waste Economy and Society, which is intended to remake the mass production, mass consumption and mass disposal as a society of the 20th century. The recycling-based society is new, so we have to clarify the relationship between recycling-based society and food-system. In this symposium we discuss the role of the foodsystem concerning to promote the recycling-based society and bring up the challenges and vision of the research. The more important recycling-based society, the more structural changes in the food system. These changes were caused by five factors (consumer, firm, innovation, regulation, circumstance). Based on the changes, 4 reporteres give a presentation of a new relationship between recycling-based society and food-system.