TOKYO - Japan's reliance on Middle Eastern crude oil has left manufacturers exposed to rising costs for plastic containers, ink and other products that use naphtha, but JEPLAN President Masaki Takao is pushing a recycling technology that could reduce the need for petroleum-derived raw materials by turning used plastic back into material close to new.
The technology, known as chemical recycling, breaks PET bottles down to the molecular level and removes impurities that have long limited conventional recycling. Takao says the process allows plastic to be reused repeatedly without loss of quality, creating what he describes as a semipermanent resource cycle.
"The more recycled material we use, the more we can reduce petroleum-based raw materials," Takao said. "Basically, it can be used almost semipermanently."
JEPLAN collects used PET bottles and restores them to a quality equivalent to petroleum-derived material before returning them to the market. Takao said the approach is rare globally because it goes beyond waste treatment and treats discarded plastic as an industrial raw material. "I did not want this to be an extension of garbage disposal. I wanted to do proper manufacturing, and it just happened that the raw material was waste. I believe waste is a resource," he said.
At a large plant built on a site about the size of Tokyo Dome with an investment of about 13 billion yen, crushed and washed PET bottles are brought in as feedstock. The plant receives about 60 tons of material a day from municipalities across Japan, equivalent to roughly 3 million PET bottles.
The incoming material is not perfectly clean. Some flakes are discolored, and some contain different types of plastic. Such impurities have been a major obstacle to recycling because they accumulate each time plastic is reused, lowering quality.
Takao said JEPLAN developed its process to solve that problem by purifying the material so it can be circulated many times. "With conventional methods, impurities inevitably build up and quality deteriorates," he said. "We wanted to solve that by refining the material so it can be circulated repeatedly. If it circulates, there is less need to introduce new petroleum resources."
Japan is often described as having a high plastic recycling rate, but much of that comes from thermal recycling, in which waste is burned and the heat is recovered as energy. Thermal recycling accounts for 66% of Japan's plastic recycling, while mechanical recycling, which melts plastic and returns it to material use, accounts for 20%.
Mechanical recycling has limits because impurities build up after repeated processing, making about three cycles the practical ceiling before the plastic ultimately has to be burned. Chemical recycling, the field Takao is pursuing, accounts for only about 2%.
At the plant, JEPLAN showed a white liquid produced by breaking down PET flakes at the molecular level. "The PET flakes from earlier have been decomposed to the molecular level, and this is the result," Takao said. "Because we decompose and refine them at the molecular level, we can return them to the level of new material."
JEPLAN is also applying the technology to polyester used in clothing, drawing interest from European companies facing strict environmental standards. Takao is betting that the process can address both resource shortages and environmental pressures by creating a circular system in which plastic waste is repeatedly reborn as high-quality material.
Source: テレ東BIZ
