About Panasonic > Environmental Activities > Products > Resouces Recycling through Products
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About Panasonic
Resouces Recycling through Products
- Reducing Resources Used
Making Full Use of Recycled Resources
Utilizing recycled resources
We promote the use of recycled resources by making the best use of them in the creation of new products, and we promote recycling resources, such as plastic. In fiscal 2011, we created a guideline for understanding how to utilize recycled resources by material and started a system that promotes the use of recycled resources. We will build a foundation to make better use of recycled resources by improving our quality assurance system and accelerate the development of necessary technologies.
Car speaker
We have developed the industry’s first* car speaker that has a frame made from recycled polypropylene by combining our technology to extract high-purity polypropylene from a mix of various plastic and metal materials, technology to mix the recycled polypropylene, and the methodology to manage the quality. We began mass production of these car speakers in February 2011.
- *As of February 2011 (surveyed by Panasonic).
Car speaker frame
Tilted drum washer/dryer and refrigerator
In terms of weight, washers and refrigerators comprise about 36% and 40% plastics, respectively. The plastics used in these products are generally recycled by being melted, filtered for the removal of foreign matters, and processed into pellets. Panasonic, however, has established a technology that has no heating or melting steps to recycle plastics without pelletizing, thereby preventing the degradation of the materials by heat and also reducing CO2 emissions. We then use the plastics thus recycled as product materials.
The use of recycled plastic in washers and refrigerators has been increasing year by year. In fiscal 2011, we fostered the use of recycled plastics in more components for these products and were able to increase the use of recycled plastic substantially over the previous year’s level.
Use of recycled plastics
Panasonic is one of the leading companies to use recycled plastics. Environmental Technology Solutions Co., Ltd., which is established by Panasonic, distributes recycled resin from four home appliance products. Panasonic uses some of the recycled resin in its products and an amount of use in fiscal 2010 was approx 2,600 tons, which were mainly in washing machines and refrigerators.
Total usage of plastics in fiscal 2010 for washing machines and refrigerators was 27,179 tons including 3,759 tons of recycled resin including that recycled within production processes. The ratio of recycled resin usage was 13.8%
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