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Philosophy and Foresight of
Tokyo Eco Recycle Co., Ltd
- Since the beginning of the 20th century, people have extracted natural resources from the earth and discharged a vast amount of waste at an accelerating pace. If nothing is done, someday the earth will be not only dried up its natural resources but also overflowed with waste materials. Natural resources are exhaustible and the space of the earth we live in is also limited. What forms the affluence of our present life is nothing but the consumption of natural resources and the accumulation of wastes.
- In the 21st century, we, people, must have a new mind-set about how to continue our life exploiting the limited resources and space on the earth.This is why the 21st century is also called the "Century of the Environment." For the first time converted this mind-set into a tangible form in the area of solid wastes in Japan is the Electric Appliance Recycling Law. The Japanese home appliance industry including Hitachi, Ltd., Tokyo Eco Recycle’s parent company, commissioned and supported by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (currently the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) and the Association for Electric Home Appliances, had made efforts since 1991 and succeeded in developing home appliance recycling technologies. Based on the technologies, the Electric Appliance Recycling Law was enacted in 1998 and came into effect in 2001. Following this, in 1999, Hitachi founded Tokyo Eco Recycle Co., Ltd. with the purpose to recover and reuse resources from four home appliances?refrigerator, washing machine, air conditioner and television. Presently, Tokyo Eco Recycle recovers resources from other electric products than home appliance, including PCs and control panels.
Home appliances are manufactured from resources such as iron, copper, aluminum and plastics. In Japan, these resources are recovered from used products at recycling factories, using a portion of home appliance recycling charges collected from consumers. In order to maximize the recovery rate, used home appliances are collected and manually disassembled to pick up marketable resources like motors and plastics and remained parts are crushed to extract metals and plastics. That is, used home appliances are divided into valuable resources and wastes to be disposed at certain charge. Efforts are made, however, even to decompose the remained wastes to recycle further or use residuals of incinerated wastes as cement raw material so that the amount of final wastes directly going to landfills can be reduced. Through such efforts, since 2002, Tokyo Eco Recycle has succeeded in achieving almost zero emission at approximately 0.1% of final waste landfill rate. This contributes to a significant extension of the life of landfills and is a revolutionary progress compared to the time when, in worst cases, home appliances directly wound up in landfills before the Electric Appliance Recycling Law was enacted.
In addition, Tokyo Eco Recycle is proud to report that it now processes wastes at a cost 50% lower than the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. At the same time the company has created a new industry in which new jobs are also created. Meanwhile, economic, environmental and social efficiencies are all improved. The so-called recycle-oriented society is not just an ideal but is realness in the home appliance-recycling sector.
In our daily life, the circulation of water resource is possible thanks to the sewage system. No one will not oppose to the fact the sewerage is a necessity and we are responsible to pay effluent charges. In the 20th century, the sewage system became one of common-sense things to people. In the future, any solid wastes emitted from towns and cities, domestic or industrial, will also be recycled and reused as new resources and this practice will become a new common sense in the 21st century.
And to this practice, we should give the priority in the order of material recycling, thermal recycling, incineration and landfill. Tokyo Eco Recycle has been proving that, by assigning as high priority to material recycling as possible, we, people, can reduce the amount of resources extracted from nature (improvement in environment-friendliness) and at the same time lower procurement costs of raw material to be used in manufacturing (improvement in economic efficiency).
Learning from bitter experience with environmental pollution in the nation, the Japanese government has been taking an array of measures to move along the path to a recycle-oriented society. The recycle-oriented society is the government’s policy objective to pursue both economical growth and environmental sustainability. When we have a broader perspective, we can see differences in the policies between high-wage countries and low-wage countries. Tokyo Eco Recycle has a vital role in understanding such differences as well as forecasting the effect of different policies taken by different countries and then proposing a specific scenario to realize the recycle-oriented society to contribute to the global society. And Tokyo Eco Recycle believes that it can truly take advantage of its accumulated experience in business in this area.
For instance, every company can "increase" profits from marketable recycled resource and "reduce" costs of waste disposal, if the company really tries. On the other hand, however, it is not easy to "maximize" profits from marketable recycled resource or "minimize" costs of waste disposal, if the company has no long experience but wants to recover small fractions of hazardous materials contained in products manufactured when there was not a comprehensive chemical information database. Companies for the first time start in full swing to recycle resources in home appliance will easily waste time in trials and errors and hence will suffer significant losses. Tokyo Eco Recycle can offer expertise and advice to such companies and is willing and preparing to license its know-how. Tokyo Eco Recycle is pleased to cooperate with other companies to set out to bring about a society that can achieve economic growth and environmental sustainability at the same time.
Kenji Baba, Director
Tokyo Eco Recycle Co., Ltd.
