2025.09.02
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Visualization efforts to reduce environmental impact Vol.2 – Home appliance recycling –
Mitsubishi Materials operates a home appliance recycling business at seven plants operated by six companies in Japan, and since 2003, it has been working to visualize the environmental impact of its products using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
LCA calculates the environmental impact of recycling home appliances and converting them into recycled materials, and compares it with the impact of producing new materials from natural resources without recycling, evaluating the difference as the environmental impact reduction effect.
The environmental impact is assessed based on GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions, energy consumption, natural mineral resource consumption, and landfill disposal volume. Activity data required for the assessment is collected from home appliance recycling plants, and AIST-IDEA (*) data is used for the basic unit.
*AIST-IDEA is a database that provides the basic units required for visualizing environmental impacts.
In addition, the amount of fluorocarbons recovered at home appliance recycling plants is evaluated in terms of CO2 equivalent. These ongoing initiatives have been highly praised externally and were awarded the LCA Society of Japan Chairman's Award at the LCA Society of Japan Awards.
These evaluations are carried out using a proprietary cloud-based operation management system. By incorporating an evaluation function into the system installed at home appliance recycling plants, it is now possible to input basic unit data and use the data in the system to automatically calculate evaluation results. The automation is expected to reduce calculation work hours by approximately three months across six plants operated by five companies. We believe that this type of evaluation function in the home appliance recycling plant system is currently the only one of its kind in the industry.
LCA calculates the environmental impact of recycling home appliances and converting them into recycled materials, and compares it with the impact of producing new materials from natural resources without recycling, evaluating the difference as the environmental impact reduction effect.
The environmental impact is assessed based on GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions, energy consumption, natural mineral resource consumption, and landfill disposal volume. Activity data required for the assessment is collected from home appliance recycling plants, and AIST-IDEA (*) data is used for the basic unit.
*AIST-IDEA is a database that provides the basic units required for visualizing environmental impacts.
In addition, the amount of fluorocarbons recovered at home appliance recycling plants is evaluated in terms of CO2 equivalent. These ongoing initiatives have been highly praised externally and were awarded the LCA Society of Japan Chairman's Award at the LCA Society of Japan Awards.
These evaluations are carried out using a proprietary cloud-based operation management system. By incorporating an evaluation function into the system installed at home appliance recycling plants, it is now possible to input basic unit data and use the data in the system to automatically calculate evaluation results. The automation is expected to reduce calculation work hours by approximately three months across six plants operated by five companies. We believe that this type of evaluation function in the home appliance recycling plant system is currently the only one of its kind in the industry.
The environmental impact reduction effects for six plants operated by five home appliance recycling companies in the fiscal year ended March 2024 are as follows. (Compared to a scenario in which all used home appliances are landfilled)
5. Effects of fluorocarbon recovery: Approx. 1.24 million t-CO2/year
We will continue our efforts in LCA evaluation so that our assessment methodology becomes the de facto standard in the home appliance recycling industry, leading to further establishment of our position and expansion of the resource circulation business.
