Before the Chair Becomes Garbage

A used chair has an awkward economic life. It may be perfectly sound and still be almost worthless.

The owner no longer wants it. A conventional secondhand shop may decide the resale margin is too small. Listing it online takes photographs, messages, scheduling and sometimes a stranger arriving at the door. Shipping a chair can cost more than the chair is worth. Yet the municipal waste system is extremely good at doing the opposite: turning an inconvenient object into a standardized disposal problem.

That gap—between “still useful” and “worth selling”—is where Akashi City’s newest reuse experiment sits.

On August 21, the city and Jimoty opened the first Jimoty Spot in Akashi, in the Uozumi area. Akashi residents can bring eligible household goods without a reservation and without paying a handover fee. Staff and the user check whether an item can realistically be used again. Accepted goods then enter a local resale-and-giveaway stream. People looking for something can check listings online, inspect the actual item at the store and take it away at a low price or, for some goods, ¥0.

The phrase “zero-yen reuse center” is catchy. It is also incomplete. This is not a store in which everything is free. Jimoty’s examples for the Akashi launch included an ¥800 stroller, a ¥500 microwave and a ¥0 chair. The more important zero is on the other side of the transaction: for a resident with an accepted item, the cost of handing it over is zero.

The most valuable object may be the one that never becomes waste

Japan’s recycling reputation can obscure the order of its own waste hierarchy.

The Basic Act for Establishing a Sound Material-Cycle Society, enacted in 2000, set out a priority that is easy to say and much harder to build into daily life: first suppress waste generation; then reuse what can still be used; then recycle materials; then recover heat; finally dispose of what remains. The Environment Ministry still describes reuse as the priority immediately after reduction because extending a product’s life can avoid not only disposal but also some of the resource and environmental burdens of making its replacement.

That means a chair passed intact from one household to another is conceptually different from a chair dismantled, crushed and turned into material feedstock. Recycling asks, “What material can this object become?” Reuse asks an earlier question: “Does it need to stop being an object at all?”

This difference matters because recycling itself uses labor, transport, sorting and energy. It can be essential, especially when a product is no longer safe or functional, but it begins after the original product has lost its original use. Reuse tries to delay that moment.

The circular economy is often drawn as arrows. In real life, it depends on whether getting rid of a usable chair is more troublesome than giving it to somebody who wants one.

Why a website needed a building

Jimoty began as a local classified platform. Its “for sale / giveaway” model addressed an old problem with an internet tool: connect nearby people so a low-value object does not need an expensive logistics chain.

That works beautifully when users are comfortable taking photographs, writing a listing, answering messages and arranging a handoff. It works less well for people who dislike online negotiation, do not want a stranger coming to their home, are in the middle of a move, or simply have too many items to list one by one.

Jimoty’s answer was physical infrastructure.

The company started the Jimoty Spot concept in 2021. That October, an important municipal test began in Setagaya, Tokyo, at a time when pandemic-era lifestyle changes had contributed to a surge in bulky-waste requests. The district and company created a place where residents could bring usable unwanted items before those objects entered the waste stream.

The six-month result was strong enough to change the scale of the idea: about 12,854 items were brought into the system, about 12,206 were reused, a reuse rate of roughly 95%, and the project estimated about 68.3 tonnes of bulky-waste reduction. A government public-private partnership case study estimated an annual fiscal effect of about ¥17.05 million if that performance were sustained.

The lesson was not that every municipality needed another secondhand store. It was that a physical handoff point could remove the friction that an online marketplace leaves behind.

Akashi is not starting from zero

The store arrives in a city already trying to force its waste curve downward.

Akashi’s “Zero Waste Akashi” program says the city processed 95,546 tonnes of waste in fiscal 2018. By fiscal 2025, the figure had fallen to about 84,000 tonnes. The target for fiscal 2031 is 81,000 tonnes—roughly 15% below the 2018 baseline.

Those numbers are not an abstract environmental scorecard. Akashi is preparing a new waste-processing facility, with current plans including an incineration plant sized at no more than 276 tonnes per day plus resource-processing equipment. The city has also said waste reduction is necessary to make the new facility more compact and extend the life of what it expects to be its final landfill site.

That gives reuse a fiscal and engineering meaning. Every object diverted before it becomes municipal waste is an object that does not need to be collected, handled, crushed, burned, sorted or buried by the public system.

Akashi is attacking that problem from several directions. It has paper-recovery boxes, used-cooking-oil collection connected to sustainable aviation fuel, toothbrush recycling, PET-bottle recycling, a municipal recycled-furniture display and a partnership with the “Oikura” appraisal service. A simple designated garbage-bag system is scheduled to enter a transition period in September 2026 and full operation in March 2027.

The Jimoty Spot differs from most of those projects in one basic way: the item can leave the system almost exactly as it entered. A microwave remains a microwave. A stroller remains a stroller. A shelf remains a shelf.

The economics of the almost-worthless

Traditional resale markets are very good at things with enough margin. A desirable camera, luxury bag, current smartphone or collectible can finance the costs of inspection, inventory, rent, staff, payment processing and resale risk.

A perfectly usable ¥500 microwave is a more difficult business proposition.

This is why local reuse has a hidden enemy: transaction cost. The environmental value of keeping a product in use can be real even when its resale price is tiny. But someone still has to receive it, decide whether it works, store it, show it to buyers and get it into the next household.

Jimoty Spots try to lower those costs in several ways at once. The donor brings the item, reducing pickup logistics. The network’s online listings create local visibility. The recipient generally collects the item, reducing delivery. Municipal promotion reaches residents precisely when they are considering waste disposal. In Akashi, a local operator—Octopus Cleans, which already works in waste collection, cleaning, estate clearing and related services—adds existing knowledge of the physical flow of unwanted goods.

The Akashi store accepts a wide range of usable items: small appliances, hobby and sports goods, children’s products, tableware, household goods, furniture below specified dimensions, clothing, books, discs and pet goods. But “usable” is a real filter. Broken, heavily soiled or odorous products are not accepted. Appliances may be checked for power and basic operation. Certain legally or practically difficult categories—including the four major home-appliance recycling categories, larger furniture and some safety-sensitive children’s products—are excluded.

That boundary matters. A reuse center becomes a waste dump if it accepts everything. The model works only if it can say no before unusable material changes hands.

“Mottainai” is not infrastructure

Japan frequently reaches for the word mottainai when discussing waste: the feeling that it is regrettable to throw away something whose value has not been exhausted.

The feeling matters. It is not enough.

A household can sincerely believe that a child’s desk, rice cooker or box of dishes deserves another life and still put it out as waste because the reuse path demands too much time. A city can ask residents to recycle carefully and still design a system in which disposal is simpler than donation. A marketplace can connect people and still exclude residents who are not comfortable managing a digital transaction.

Infrastructure is what turns a preference into a default.

Akashi’s experiment is therefore less about persuading residents that waste is bad than about redesigning the moment of decision. The city already has a bulky-waste system: large items require advance application and a disposal fee. Its own waste webpage now interrupts that pathway with a question—before using bulky-waste disposal, have you considered reuse?—and points residents toward both online appraisal and the Jimoty Spot.

That small change in sequence is the circular economy at street level. The disposal system is still there. But reuse gets asked first.

The number that matters is not 0

Jimoty’s national figures show why municipalities are paying attention. The company says its Spots facilitated about 1.4 million reuse transactions in 2025 and estimates that those transactions prevented about 4,300 tonnes of waste. By August 2026, when it announced the Akashi store, it said it had reuse agreements with 311 municipalities and was operating Spots with 42 of them.

Its ambitions are far larger: 329 stores by 2030 and an estimated 84,000 tonnes of annual waste reduction, a figure based on an assumed average of 254 tonnes per qualifying store. Jimoty compares that target with roughly 1.34 million tonnes of household bulky waste and discarded clothing nationwide.

Those forecasts should be treated as forecasts, not outcomes. Store performance will vary with population, location, opening hours, housing patterns, item mix, staffing and local participation. A reused object also does not necessarily create a one-for-one reduction in new manufacturing: the recipient might not otherwise have bought a new product, and some reused goods may have relatively short remaining lives.

Yet reuse has one advantage that is easy to understand even without a life-cycle model. If the same functional object satisfies another household’s need, society gets more service from the resources, labor and energy already embedded in it.

A shop is also a sorting algorithm

There is a technological temptation to imagine the circular economy as better databases: digital product passports, AI sorting, automated resale prices, material tracking. Those tools may become important.

But a neighborhood reuse center performs a much older computation.

Is this object still a thing, or has it become waste?

The answer is not purely physical. A chair with four solid legs can become waste if nobody can cheaply find it. A stroller can remain a product if the next family is visible. A microwave that still heats food has almost no circular value while it sits unseen beside a disposal pile; it gains value when a trusted local channel gives it another user.

Akashi is effectively inserting a marketplace into the municipal waste funnel before the irreversible steps begin.

That is why the physical storefront matters even in an era of apps. The building creates a common place where the object can wait without requiring the original owner and next owner to find each other at the same moment. It turns a bilateral transaction into inventory. It removes the donor from the negotiation. It lets the buyer touch the object. And municipal participation signals that reuse is not merely an informal exchange at the margins of the waste system; it is part of the city’s waste strategy.

What happens to Akashi’s 3,000-tonne gap?

Akashi’s most recent figures put the city at about 84,000 tonnes of annual waste processing, with a 2031 target of 81,000. That final 3,000 tonnes will not disappear because one reuse shop opens in Uozumi.

Food waste, packaging, paper, plastics, commercial waste, household behavior and collection rules all matter. The city’s future designated-bag system is intended to make sorting clearer. Recycling projects pull specific materials back into production. Composting and food-loss measures attack organic waste. The new treatment plant still has to handle what remains.

Reuse occupies a narrower but intellectually important part of the system: the moment before an object becomes waste at all.

The first months at Akashi Uozumi will answer practical questions that national targets cannot. What do residents actually bring? How much is rejected? How quickly do large low-value goods find a second owner? What categories sit too long? Does the store attract people who previously used online resale, or people who would otherwise have used bulky-waste collection? Does convenience change behavior?

Those are mundane questions. They are also exactly how circular economies become real.

A city does not become circular when it learns to process garbage efficiently. It becomes more circular when useful things reach another person before the city has to call them garbage.

The most interesting object in the Akashi store may therefore be the cheapest one: the chair marked ¥0.

Its price says almost nothing about the labor, timber, metal, fuel and factory energy embedded in it. It says only that, in this place and at this moment, the market price needed to move it is zero.

If someone carries it home, the chair has performed a small escape. No shredding. No melting. No furnace. No new material identity. It simply remains a chair.