By Suvendrini Kakuchi
YASHIRO, Japan, Apr 18 2002 (IPS)

Standing tall amid the green pastures of this small town, an hour’s drive from Japan’s second largest city of Osaka, is a high-technology factory that recycles nothing less than television sets to washing machines.

It is Matsushita’s Eco Technology Centre (METEC), Japan’s largest recycling factory for home appliances that marks its first anniversary this month – and is the priciest out of several new corporate moves toward recycling.

The recycling of household appliances is a key step in encouraging recycling in this industrialised country of 127 million, where people are used to buying new products to keep up with new technology and then discarding them after a few years.

Up to February this year, the 38 million U.S. dollar factory broke down and recycled 514,000 appliances including refrigerators and air conditions, almost all the units brought in from collection sites.

Factory officials hope to be recycling a million used home appliances — refrigerators, washing machines, televisions and air conditioners — in the next few years.

Matsushita and other companies are developing recycling facilities after a law, passed in April last year, required both consumers and manufacturers of household appliances to have them recycled.

Under the new regulations, consumers must pay to have their electronic products taken away from their homes, aimed at having corporations to take advantage of the commercial aspect of recycling and encourage the habit of recycling among consumers.

While the figure that the Matsushita factory recycles is miniscule, compared to the flood of manufactured goods entering Japan’s consumer market annually, environmentalists believe that the psychological step the law represents is important.

“The law is important against a national background that has encouraged production over environment protection,” says Junichi Sato of Greenpeace Japan.

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co is Japan’s top producer of household electronic appliances. It is also the largest domestic refrigerator maker, churning out 1.37 million units annually or 21 percent of total national production.

Says Nobuhisa Ito, director of Matsushita’s corporate environment affairs division: “Our objective is to reduce waste through recycling and producing new products with the recycled material.”

The Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, reported this month that an estimated 8.55 million used electrical appliances have been collected under the new recycling law.

That is still just half of the estimated 18 million home appliances discarded by consumers.

Consumers who are reluctant to pay for recycling dump the rest illegally in places like mountains and the sea, according to government officials, or leave items they do not want in the streets.

Sato explains that forcing consumers to pay for discarding their household appliances represents the key issue in the new law.

“It is difficult to convince people to pay for recycling,” he says. “While the law is important, the government must also work towards reducing the millions of products flooding the consumer market,” he adds, saying the key remains changing consumer attitudes toward a more conservation-oriented society.

But Masayuki Toda of the Recycle Friends Association, a citizen’s environmental group, points out that the one-year-old law would encourage people to shop less for home appliances.

Indeed, homemaker Junko Nakayama says she postponed buying a new washing machine that is equipped with a dryer, because she was reluctant to pay the disposal charges of up to 30. U.S. dollars.

“I thought hard and decided I am going to keep using my old washing machine for another couple of years to save some money,” she explains.

Despite the uphill struggle in Japan to develop more ways of effective recycling, green activists hail the new Matsushita factory as a step in the right direction because it ensures more corporate responsibility.

A tour of the factory reveals a state-of-the art technology. On the factory floor, assembly lines carry used appliances that are taken apart by engineers after they are crushed or melted in massive machines.

The process is expensive and only around 15 percent of the products can be totally recycled at this time, Matsushita officials say.

But, says Ito, the factory reports some success — for example, Matsushita is now producing new television sets using 15 to 20 percent of recycled glass.

The same procedure is followed in the section dealing with old refrigerators. After engineers take away reusable parts, a refrigerator is crushed in a high-speed compressor, a powerful machine that devours the appliance in less than a second. Then, plastic, steel and aluminium material from it are collected neatly in stacks for further recycling or sale to other companies.

Wind power is used in the factory to run machines that sort glass, aluminium, copper and other components.

In addition, says Ito, researchers at the factory are developing new products from old items, such as motor compresses or wooden slates.

Still, Ito explains, the Matsushita Eco Technology Centre faces huge barriers in its goal of achieving 100 percent success.

For example, researchers are struggling with high recycling costs being too dependent on expensive technology. Expensive technology costs, in turn, sharply increase the prices of new television sets manufactured with used components.

Other environmental challenges include keeping the factory clean, in harmony with the surrounding environment and developing recycling methods it uses. Towards this purpose, the factory is sound proof and has recycling plants for water.

“Recycling is an expensive target. Our focus is on tackling this important issue,” says Ito.

Meantime, Sato says that in the end, Japanese consumers have to learn to get deeper into the recycling habit. “Only big companies can afford the huge cost of a recycling factory”.

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