Tachikawa’s Green Future: Zero Carbon, Farmland and Springs Guide

Tachikawa has pledged to cut CO2 by 60% by 2030. A walk through its plans: a waste-heat foot bath, solar panels, disappearing green and summer heat.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Tachikawa’s rubbish incinerator has a foot bath.

North of the Tachikawa City Clean Center in Izumicho, nicknamed “Tachimuny”, there is an open space where you can soak your feet in water warmed by the incinerator’s surplus heat. The city’s guide asks you to bring a towel. The heat from burning rubbish warms people’s feet. I know of no other facility that turns the word “recycling” into something so bluntly physical.

On 26 June 2025, that same city declared itself a “Zero Carbon City”, aiming to bring its carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050. Its new basic environmental plan sets a nearer, and steeper, target. By fiscal 2030, cut carbon dioxide emissions within the city by 60% compared with fiscal 2013. Japan’s national target for the same year is a 46% cut. Tachikawa, in other words, has chosen a higher mountain than the country.

Can the town with a foot bath really climb that mountain? And how much of its remaining green and water will still be there in the Tachikawa of ten years from now? Carrying the city’s planning documents in place of a map, I set out to walk it.

(For orientation: Tachikawa (立川) is a city in the Tama area, the long western half of Tokyo beyond the 23 central wards, one ride on the JR Chuo Line from Shinjuku. North of the station lie Showa Kinen Park and old farm roads; to the south, a terrace cliff, springs and the Tama River.)

The future of Tachikawa’s environment: zero carbon by 2050, and a “60%” higher than the nation’s

What decides the future of Tachikawa’s environment is the “Tachikawa City Third Basic Environmental Plan”, which covers the ten years from fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2034. The plan makes the city’s carbon dioxide emissions the yardstick for the environment it aims for. From 790,000 tonnes in fiscal 2013 to 320,000 tonnes in fiscal 2030. And in fiscal 2050, zero tonnes, which is to say net-zero emissions.

Under the Paris Agreement, the national government has set targets of cutting emissions by 46% by fiscal 2030, 60% by fiscal 2035 and 73% by fiscal 2040, all compared with fiscal 2013. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government aims for 50% by fiscal 2030 and 60% by fiscal 2035, compared with fiscal 2000. Tachikawa’s 60% means reaching the figure the nation aims for in fiscal 2035, five years early.

So how far has it come? According to the plan, the city’s emissions have been on a downward trend since fiscal 2013, and stood at 642,000 tonnes in fiscal 2021. By my calculation, that is a fall of about 19% in eight years. In the nine years left, they have to be halved from there. Having done the sum, I spent a while staring at the ceiling. The plan notes that, because of the way the figures are compiled, the latest carbon dioxide numbers are always two years old. Whether you are halfway up the mountain or still at the foot, the climber always finds out a little late.

The city knows how steep this is. The full text of the declaration says that it is also a fact that many issues exist, such as the shift to lifestyles that lead to decarbonisation, developing and securing local talent, and building the necessary facilities. I don’t think many local governments write “there are problems” into their declarations. It is a text that looks not only at brave words but at the stones under its feet.

Nor does the city mean to climb alone. On 28 January 2025 it signed a partnership agreement with Tokyo Gas on carbon-neutral town-building. The areas of cooperation include local production and consumption of energy, spreading solar power among households and businesses, and environmental and energy education in schools. On 1 October the same year it signed an agreement with the Tachikawa Chamber of Commerce and Industry too, to work on cutting emissions from businesses in the city’s industrial and commercial sectors.

Why businesses? According to the city, Tachikawa has a great many workplaces even compared with other cities in Tama, and the carbon dioxide from workplaces and the like made up 44.0% of the city’s total in 2023, the largest share. It is a town best known for the big shopping complexes by the station, but the city writes that the great majority of its workplaces are small and medium-sized firms. Those firms lack money, staff and technical information, and highly effective energy-saving equipment is slow to arrive. So the city takes part in Tokyo’s reporting scheme for climate-change measures, and when small and medium-sized firms in the city that have had an energy-saving audit refit their air conditioning, lighting, refrigeration or water-heating equipment, it pays part of the cost. In fiscal 2025 the subsidy was used six times, and the carbon dioxide saved came to 5.3 tonnes. On a mountain path heading for 320,000 tonnes, 5.3 tonnes. A small step. But a climb only ever moves forward one step at a time.

The plan also looks back at the road so far. As a result of encouraging energy saving at home and at work, saving energy has taken root as an everyday habit. On the other hand, there are also voices saying “there are lots of energy-saving actions we still don’t know about”. So, it says, the habits need to spread further. Not knowing a lot also means having plenty of room to grow.

What households can do: take your baths one after another

The plan has a column for households. To reach its fiscal 2027 target, the household sector needs to cut 80,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. With that in mind, it lists environmental actions you can take starting today, and how much each saves a year.

Set the air conditioning to about 28 degrees in summer and 20 in winter: 40.8 kilograms. Switch the lights off an hour earlier than usual: 6.9 kilograms. Get into the bath one after another without a gap, and keep the lid on the tub: 86.9 kilograms. Eat up all your rice: 1.1 kilograms. Sort your rubbish before putting it out: 2.9 kilograms.

(A note for readers from abroad: in a Japanese home, the family usually shares one deep tub of hot water, each person washing first and then soaking in turn. The longer the gap between bathers, the more the water cools and has to be reheated. Hence the lid.)

The chief lesson of this table is plain. Families: take your baths in a row. The order of the bath does nearly 80 times as much good as finishing your rice. The small courtesies of a household after dinner, “you go in first”, are the front line of Tachikawa’s decarbonisation.

The actions with bigger effects are listed too. Fit solar panels and use the power yourself: 2,582 kilograms. Switch your electricity contract to a renewable plan: 1,798 kilograms. The plan reckons that if, of the city’s 90,980 households in fiscal 2021, a new 30% took up the easy actions and a new 15% took up the high-impact ones, the fiscal 2027 target could be met.

The insulation grants sell out in spring

The city also subsidises insulating homes. If you have a firm based in the city replace the windows or doors of an existing home with insulating ones, or put insulation into the outer walls, ceilings or floors, the city pays half the cost of the work, up to 50,000 yen. It limits the scheme to local firms, the city writes, so that the money circulates within the area.

However, applications for fiscal 2026 opened on 1 April and have already closed because the budget ran out. The budget was 2.5 million yen. At the full 50,000 yen each, that is 50 homes. It is good that the scheme is popular, but for me, deciding in autumn that I wanted new windows, it was a little late.

A new system has come in for food waste too. From October 2024 the city introduced “Otasuke Tabesuke Tachikawa”. Shops in the city that sell food post items close to their best-before or use-by dates on the web, and people who see them reserve and buy them. It is a kind of service called food sharing, connecting shops and customers, and it can also be used through a smartphone app. The 1.1 kilograms for finishing your rice looked small, but count the leftovers on shop shelves too and the story changes.

There are ways of getting children involved as well. In August 2025 the city ran “Eco Challenge”, in which elementary school children and their parents formed teams to save energy at home. Elementary schools, nursery schools and children’s centres are given bitter gourd (goya) seeds and soil to grow “green curtains” of climbing vines across their windows. The city also keeps up a cycle of collecting green-curtain seeds from local people and handing them out to the next year’s participants. Like the water in the foot bath, the bitter gourd seeds go round and round the town.

Panels on the roofs: even the cycling track makes power

The city government uses its own roofs too. According to the city, it actively uses electricity from renewable sources at its public facilities, and has fitted solar power whenever it renovates or rebuilds above a certain scale. Recently it has added storage batteries as well, so power can be used at night and on rainy days.

Run your eye down the list, and there is a very Tachikawa line-up. The city hall’s solar array, 60.8 kilowatts, in fiscal Heisei 21 (2009). Kashiwa Elementary School, 10 kilowatts, in fiscal Heisei 23 (2011). (Heisei is the imperial era that ran from 1989 to 2019, and Reiwa the one that began in 2019; Japanese local records count years by era, so I give both.) Into the Reiwa era come 21.14 kilowatts and a battery for the gymnasium of Tachikawa No. 7 Junior High School, then Matsunaka Elementary School, Tachikawa No. 9 Junior High School, the Child-rearing Support and Health Centre, and the Sunagawa Learning Centre. And in fiscal Reiwa 7 (2025), Tachikawa Keirin, the city’s velodrome for professional track-cycling races, got 55.5 kilowatts of solar and a 35.3-kilowatt-hour battery. Beside the banked track where cyclists race flat out, the roof quietly makes electricity.

Then / now: from smokestack to foot bath

Let’s go back to the foot bath from the opening. The new waste plant, the Clean Center Tachimuny, began accepting rubbish in fiscal Reiwa 4 (fiscal 2022). It began operating in March, and the first issue of the facility’s newsletter reported that six months had passed since operations began and that visitors had passed 1,500 in total. To the north, “Tachimuny Hiroba”, an open space, has been laid out, doubling as a place for back-up support in disasters and for raising awareness about waste.

Back then, as a rule, plants that burn rubbish were not welcomed by the people living near them. The city still keeps a page recording the history of, and its efforts around, the old waste plant. Now, the facility heats a foot bath with its surplus heat, holds an environment fair, and every year holds briefings on its operations. From a facility people dislike to a facility people choose to visit. If the use of the incinerator’s heat has changed, it is presumably because the relationship between the town and the plant has changed.

That foot bath has one more of Tachikawa’s “futures” written on it. When a heatstroke alert is issued, the foot bath is temporarily switched off. Under a special heatstroke alert, the whole open space closes for the day. Summer heat can stop even a foot bath warmed by rubbish. Few notices teach you so concretely what it means for the climate to change.

Tachikawa’s green and environment in numbers

• 60% — the cut in carbon dioxide by fiscal 2030 (compared with fiscal 2013). The figure the nation aims for in fiscal 2035, five years early.
• 86.9 — kilograms. The carbon dioxide a household can save in a year by bathing one after another and keeping the lid on the tub. About 80 times the effect of finishing your rice. The order of the bath is an environmental issue.
• 55.5 — kilowatts. The solar power installed at Tachikawa Keirin. It is not a system for turning the riders’ leg power into electricity.
• 36.5% — the share of green cover in fiscal 2023. Behind this number is a story of green that disappears and reappears.
• 170 hectares or more — the area of protected farmland the city hopes to keep in fiscal 2029. Less than now. That is the honest thing about this plan.

The last two numbers bring us to the town’s green. Is Tachikawa’s green growing, or shrinking?