After a record number of lost and found items were handed in to it last year, Tokyo police are looking into ways to keep such items from going to waste.

In 2024, the Metropolitan Police Department received some 4.756 million lost items recovered in the Japanese capital.

While about 30% of such items are usually returned to their owners, those not collected during the police storage period or whose owners have given up ownership belong to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.

Such items are either resold through secondhand goods stores or exported.

Previously, the MPD's Lost and Found Center sold such items to secondhand goods dealers if its employees judged them to be fit for sale.

Amid an expected decline in headcount due to recent years' recruitment challenges, the department has made it a priority to reduce the increasingly burdensome work related to lost and found items.

To improve efficiency, the MPD in fiscal 2024 adopted a bidding process to sell unsorted items in bulk to businesses.

For this fiscal year, a secondhand goods dealer based in the city of Fukaya, Saitama Prefecture, has been selected to buy lost and found items from the Tokyo police center.

Every week, two trucks collect the items from the center, which are estimated to number between 1.3 million and 1.5 million annually.

With the exception of unsellable items, such as a single glove, the products are sold at special "lost property markets" held at department stores and on online auction websites.

Unbranded products that are unlikely to sold domestically are exported to the Philippines and other countries.

"Lost and found items mirror society," Saneyoshi Yogi, who heads the Fukaya-based company, said.

While wireless earphones and umbrellas make up the bulk of them, the latest models of electric appliances, trendy fashion items, expensive musical instruments and limited-edition Pokemon cards are also among the mountains of lost and found items collected by the company.

"I'm excited every day to see what we'll find," Yogi said.

The special lost property markets are extremely popular, with some department stores seeing queues of up to 200 people before they open for the day, the company said.

Compared to recycling shops, which collect discarded or out-of-date items, lost and found items at the police center often include unopened rolls of toilet paper and unused, high-end branded products that appear to have just been purchased at department stores.

As the company has agreed to a lump sum contract, it picks up the lost and found items from the MPD at an average price of ¥117 ($0.80) apiece and makes only a modest profit due to the cost of labor required to sort the items.

"Lost items are filled with people's emotions and memories," Yogi said, adding that those who find and hand in lost items to the police "should not be taken for granted."

"These are things that someone picked up and delivered in good faith," Yogi said. "I'd like to avoid letting such items go to waste as much as I can."