Reduce / Reuse / Recycle

February 23, 2004

 

Teijin Launches "Bottle-to-Bottle" Recycling

Keywords: Environmental Technology Manufacturing industry Policy / Systems Reduce / Reuse / Recycle 

The corporate group of Teijin, Ltd., a major polyester manufacturer in Japan, inaugurated a complete "bottle-to-bottle" recycling plant to recycle used bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Used PET bottles will be chemically converted back into raw materials for polyester and then recycled into raw materials for PET resin. The plant has an annual production capacity of 50,000 tons of PET resin from approximately 62,000 tons of used PET bottles (equivalent to about 2 billion 500-ml PET bottles).

In 1962 Teijin began recycling fiber scraps that arise from manufacturing processes, shortly after it started producing polyester fibers, and has continued this recycling to this day. Recently the company has been developing technologies to recycle used polyester products by converting them back into raw materials. The outcome was a facility that can recover high-grade dimethyl terephthalate (DMT) having the same purity as DMT made from petroleum. This facility was inaugurated in April 2002, enabling the company to recycle used polyester fibers.

The operation of the newest plant enables the company to refine the recovered high-purity DMT into purified terephthalic acid (TPA) and produce PET resin for bottles, using 100 percent of the TPA produced. This plant is the first of its kind in the world.

In Japan, the demand for PET bottles has surged since they were introduced in 1977, resulting in production of 412,565 tons in 2002. Meanwhile, mandatory collection and recycling of used bottles was stipulated in the Law for Promotion of Sorted Collection and Recycling of Containers and Packaging, leading to a collection rate of 45.6 percent in 2002 at the municipal level. Despite this situation, the used bottles cannot be reused as bottles at present, due to restrictions under the Food Sanitation Law, so the collected bottles are usually washed, pulverized and either reformed into products such as clothes hangers and dust bins, or recycled back into fiber to produce work wear, curtains or carpets.

The volume of collected PET bottles is surging due to the increasing demand, creating a pressing need for new applications for the recycled plastic.




Posted: 2004/02/23 10:15:37 PM
Japanese version

 

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