Sony Testing Battery Recycling Project in Japanese City

Sony Corp. and the city of Kitakyushu, Japan announced plans to test the recycling of rare metals used in small electronic devices. The program will begin Sept. 1.

The project is estimated to cost around 22 million yen (roughly US$200,000), of which 2 million yen will be financed by Kitakyushu, located in the southwest of Japan. The two parties will collect digital cameras, portable digital music players, handheld game machines, electronic dictionaries, voice recorders, and other used devices except mobile phones, which are already widely recycled.

The parties will place recycling boxes at around 60 sites in the city, including do-it-yourself stores and supermarkets, for the test, which will run through March 31, 2009.

Kitakyushu-based Nippon Magnetic Dressing Co. will separate nonferrous metals from collected devices and sell the metals to Sony. Sony will outsource their refining and reuse extracted gold and platinum as well as silver and copper for its products.

Sony has reused plastics collected from cathode ray tube televisions for its liquid crystal display televisions, but this will be its first reuse attempt other than that, a company official said.