Teijin Ltd will join forces with Sumitomo Corp to develop an efficient system for recycling discarded PET bottles, the Nikkei reported.
The newspaper, in a report carried on its website over the weekend which did not identify any sources, said the polyester maker would by the end of this month begin reprocessing used bottles into PET resin at a group firm's factory.
In cooperation with the subsidiary of Tomra, Sumitomo has signed a deal with the government of Tokyo's Adachi ward to install 17 'reverse vending machines' in commercial facilities and other locations inside the ward for the purpose of chopping up collected used PET bottles. Sumitomo Corp aims to install 2,000 such machines nationwide by 2009.
Teijin Fibers Ltd, a Teijin group company, will purchase chopped-up PET bottles and reprocess them into PET resin at its factory in Yamaguchi Prefecture. It will sell the resin to soft drink bottle makers.
The partners aim to recover 130 tons of used PET bottles, a volume equivalent to 4.33 million 500-milliliter PET containers.
Recycling used PET bottles helps curb oil consumption, but no integrated system for collecting used bottles to reprocess them into PET resin exists in Japan at present, the Nikkei said.