Hagihara Industries Inc. (Head Office: Kurashiki City, Okayama Prefecture; President: Kazushi Asano; hereinafter “Hagihara Industries”) and Mitsui Chemicals, Inc. (Head Office: Chuo-ku, Tokyo; President & CEO: Osamu Hashimoto; hereinafter “Mitsui Chemicals”) have embarked on technical verification from December 2024 to identify Hagihara Industries products from collected used blue sheets (hereinafter “technical verification”), with the aim of improving the quality of Hagihara Industries’ efforts for closed loop recycling1 of used blue sheets.
■Background of Technical Verification
Hagihara Industries, which holds the leading share of the domestic blue sheet manufacturing market, has been engaged in a closed loop recycling project called “ReVALUE+” to manufacture new blue sheets from used blue sheets as the first such project in Japan since 2021, aiming to develop a sustainable society. However, contamination with other companies’ products or adhesion of foreign matter during collection has led to a drop in the quality of recycled materials, which in turn has limited the ratio of recycled materials used in closed loop recycling products. Hagihara Industries seeks to raise the quality of recycled materials and further increase the ratio of recycled materials by applying its industrial machinery manufacturing technology to develop advanced cleaning technology and equipment, granulation equipment with a high foreign matter removal function (advanced filtration), and technology to condition and modify the viscosity of resin. Meanwhile, Mitsui Chemicals is promoting the recycling of plastic materials and the visualization of recycling information by facilitating the circular economy through linking materials and information. As part of these efforts, Mitsui Chemicals is studying the development of identification technology using chemical substances contained in or intentionally added to plastic products (“chemical tracing”) for the purpose of quality control and improving recycled materials.
■Details of Technical
Verification Mitsui Chemicals will use chemical tracing to develop a method for identifying Hagihara Industries’ products from other companies’ products out of the used blue sheets collected by Hagihara Industries. Hagihara Industries will use this method to identify its own products from waste blue sheets and verify whether it is possible to improve the quality of recycled materials for closed loop recycling.
Through this verification project, Hagihara Industries and Mitsui Chemicals will seek to develop ReVALUE+ for closed loop recycling of blue sheets, as well as contribute to the development of a circular economy with new traceability3 management that combines chemical tracing with the RePLAYER blockchain platform, a resource circulation platform based on blockchain technology*2 developed by Mitsui Chemicals.
*1: Closed loop recycling refers to a recycling system where used products are recycled into resources and used for the same products.
*2: Blockchain technology is an “irreversible” database technology that continuously records all history. Given that all parties involved can access the data and that it is impossible to tamper with that data, all parties can trace when, where, and by whom the raw materials, products, etc. originated, thus achieving traceability.
*3: Traceability refers to the traceability of resources throughout their life cycle, from raw materials such as monomers and polymers to the manufacture, sale, and use of products, and their subsequent recovery, disassembly, and crushing, to their reuse as recycled materials in product manufacturing.
ReVALUE+ is a registered trademark of Hagihara Industries.
RePLAYER is a registered trademark of Mitsui Chemicals, Inc.
Inquiries regarding this release
Corporate Planning Office, Hagihara Industries Inc.
TEL:086-440-0860
Contact form：https://en.hagihara.co.jp/inquiry/
inquiry/ Corporate Communications Division, Mitsui Chemicals, Inc.
TEL:03-6880-7500
Inquiry form:https://form.mitsuichemicals.com/corporate/cc_pr_csr_ja?param=13