As a child, Noriko Ishizaka was ashamed of her father's company — a waste disposal firm with towering smoke stacks overlooking a small town in Saitama Prefecture.
"People would call him 'the garbage collector' ... and I wasn't proud of that," she recalled.
But Ishizaka Sangyo Co., once labeled an air polluter by Saitama residents, is now one of the nation's leading recycling companies and recycles an average of 95 percent of the waste it is asked to process.