Hagihara and Mitsui's Technology for Improving the Recycling of Used Blue Tarps

Japan's manufacturer of blue tarps, Hagihara Industries is aiming to help bring about a sustainable society. As part of this pursuit, 2021 saw the company launch a Japan-first project called ReVALUE+™, which uses discarded blue tarps as a raw material to produce new blue tarps through horizontal recycling.

However, the fact that discarded tarps are mixed with contaminants and other companies' products upon recovery has caused issues with the quality of the recycled goods, requiring limits on the proportion of recycled material used in horizontally recycled products.

Hagihara Industries is therefore aiming to improve the quality of recycled materials, which would in turn allow it to further increase the proportion of these materials in its products. To achieve this, the company is leveraging its production technology for industrial machinery to develop advanced cleaning technology and equipment, as well as granulation equipment with highly effective contaminant removal (i.e. advanced filtration) and technology for refining and improving resin viscosity.

Mitsui Chemicals is looking to advance the recycling of plastic materials, as well as the visualization of recycling-related information, by pursuing a circular economy in which materials and information are integrated. And as part of that effort, the company is aiming to manage and improve the quality of recycled materials by looking into the development of a technology, henceforth referred to as chemical tracing that can identify the materials contained in plastic products or any intentionally added chemical additives.

Mitsui Chemicals will use chemical tracing to construct a method for analyzing the used blue tarps collected by Hagihara Industries and distinguishing between Hagihara Industries products and products from other companies. Hagihara Industries will then conduct a trial to find whether using this method to distinguish Hagihara Industries products from others among lots of discarded blue tarps can help improve the quality of horizontally recycled goods.

Through this trial, Hagihara Industries and Mitsui Chemicals aim to help bring about a circular economy. The companies intend to achieve this by advancing the ReVALUE+™ horizontal recycling project for blue tarps, as well as by leveraging a combination of Mitsui Chemicals' chemical tracing and the company's RePLAYER™ Blockchain Platform (a resource circulation platform based on blockchain technology²) to pursue traceability³ management.

1. Horizontal recycling refers to recycling systems that use discarded products as resources from which to create the same products again.
2. The blockchain is an irreversible database that continuously records all relevant logs. It is accessible by all parties involved, and its data cannot be altered. All involved parties can track assorted data about raw materials, products and more - including who was in possession of them, when and where - which in turn enables traceability.
3. Traceability refers to the ability to track resources throughout their life cycle, spanning initial raw materials such as monomers and polymers; the manufacture, sale and use of products; those products' eventual discarding, recovery, disassembly and crushing; and the process of turning that waste back into recycled raw materials that can be reused in the manufacture of new products.