Into the Era of Landscape Creation by Recycled Resin ZEON Corporation's Turning Point of Recycling Technology in the Construction Field (1994)

Into the Era of Landscape Creation by Recycled Resin ZEON Corporation's Turning Point of Recycling Technology in the Construction Field (1994)
In 1994, Japanese industry was under pressure to shift from a linear economy in which "make it and you're done" to a recycling-oriented society in which "resources are returned and used again. After the bursting of the bubble economy, the amount of waste in Japan continued to increase, and the tightness of final disposal sites was reported daily as a social problem, prompting the national and local governments to search for new treatment technologies. In this atmosphere of anxiety, ZEON's application of recycled resin to the construction field attracted attention not only as a technological development but also as an attempt to symbolize a change in the direction of society.

ZEON handled norbornene-based DCPD (dicyclopentadiene) resin, which can be molded into large, complex shapes using a chemical reaction called Reaction Injection Molding (RIM). This lightweight, strong, and weather-resistant resin is being redefined by the company as a "construction material made from waste. The concept of using recycled resin as a landscape material and as a building material for final disposal sites was extremely cutting-edge at the time, and represented a turning point in the company's efforts to treat plastic not as "garbage" but as a "material for creating urban landscapes.

The 1990s was a time when the concept of recycling began to become a legal system: in 1991, the Law for the Promotion of Utilization of Recyclable Resources was enacted, obliging companies to make efforts to recycle resources, followed by the Containers and Packaging Recycling Law in 1995. The Earth Summit (Rio Conference in 1992) brought "sustainable development" to the international agenda, and the development of materials with low environmental impact and the recycling business expanded rapidly.

In the midst of this trend, ZEON's efforts attracted attention as one of the few domestic cases of recycled resin being implemented at construction sites. Its use as a landscape material presented a weather-resistant alternative to wood and concrete, and its application as a building material for final disposal sites was a practice that reconfigured waste disposal itself into a recycling-oriented approach.

What the 1994 article conveyed was not so much the technology itself, but rather the way society began to explore the value of converting recycling into the quality of the landscape. The streetscape using recycled resin was still only a vision of the future at the time, but that step was a solid starting point in the history of recycling technology in Japan.