Shunan City, Yamaguchi Prefecture Teijin Fibers Tokuyama Factory: The Challenge of Chemical Recycling Aimed at High-Quality Recycling Late 1990s to Early 2000s

Shunan City, Yamaguchi Prefecture Teijin Fibers Tokuyama Factory: The Challenge of Chemical Recycling Aimed at High-Quality Recycling Late 1990s to Early 2000s
The bottle-to-bottle business that began at the Teijin Fiber Tokuyama Factory in Shunan City, Yamaguchi Prefecture, was a symbolic effort at a time when Japan's recycling policy was shifting from quantity to quality.

In the late 1990s, Japan's Containers and Packaging Recycling Law came into effect, and the amount of used PET bottles collected increased rapidly. However, the mainstream of material recycling at the time centered on the conversion of used PET bottles into fiber and sheets, and it was difficult to recycle the bottles back into beverage bottles. Due to quality deterioration and safety concerns, recycled products could not replace new raw materials, and the limits of exit gradually became an issue.

Under these circumstances, Teijin Fibers chose chemical recycling, in which PET is broken down to monomer once and then repolymerized. Although this method is a complex and costly process, it had the decisive advantage of removing impurities, thus ensuring the same quality as new raw materials. The Tokuyama Plant has established this technology on a practical scale and is positioned as the world's first full-scale bottle-to-bottle recycling center.

The reason why this project was developed in Shunan City is because the area has a petrochemical complex and a concentration of raw material supplies and knowledge of chemical processes. Furthermore, the project was strongly supported by Yamaguchi Prefecture as a core project linking waste treatment and industrial promotion in its eco-town concept. The project was set to have a processing capacity of 62,000 tons per year, and PET bottles collected from all over Japan were consolidated.

At the time in Japan, recycling tended to be an end in itself, but the Tokuyama Plant's attempt was to question head-on whether recycling could truly establish a resource cycle. The idea of completing the life of a product as a closed loop, rather than simply reusing it, had a major impact on later theories of a recycling-oriented society.

However, this model was not a panacea. It was not a panacea, however, as it was subject to strict conditions, including the need to secure stable supplies of high-quality raw materials, cost burdens, and institutional evaluation. Nevertheless, the challenge of the Tokuyama Plant became a reference point for policy and technology development in the 2000s and beyond, as an example of how to raise recycling from a quantity-based process to a quality-based circulation.

The fact that such an advanced recycling model was implemented in the regional city of Shunan itself is proof that Japan's environmental industry has begun to move toward a mature stage.