Mitsubishi Electric's goal is closed-loop recycling, which involves using old home appliance products to make new ones. The recycling of plastic collected from used home appliances for reuse in various knick-knacks, imitation wood and other products, a practice called downgrading, is commonplace. With this approach, however, limited natural resources have to be consumed in order to create new home appliance products.
Closed-loop recycling involves using plastic, a valuable resource, collected from our old products to make our new products. We are currently making progress in research and development on plastic recycling technologies to this end
Setting high targets based on our original level-based scheme Mitsubishi Electric has introduced its own level-based scheme in connection with the development of recycling technologies (see the list below). Most conventional plastic recycling is Level 2 recycling -- the reuse of single plastic materials easily removed from used products through manual dismantling. However, only about 10% of plastic can be removed from recovered products via manual dismantling. The rest ends up being burned or buried after being mixed and pulverized.
We are currently tackling Level 4, which means we are working to collect and automatically sort recycleable materials from mixture of residual plastic, which has long proven difficult to recycle, and use these materials in products.
Levels of Recycling Technology Difficulty
| Level 1 | Reusing only parts that are easy to manually dismantle, differentiate the types of plastics and remove impurities |
|---|---|
| Level 2 | Reusing only parts that are easy to manually dismantle and differentiate the types of plastics |
| Level 3 | Reusing after manually dismantling and individually analyzing the types of plastics |
| Level 4 | Reusing after automatically sorting plastics that have been mixed and pulverized |
What is normally referred to as recycled plastic actually contains a certain percentage of new material. Our goal however is 100% recycled plastic materials. We are currently engaged in research and development to produce high-quality, recycled plastic in order to stop using new materials entirely and make 100% recycled plastic materials a reality.
