|
||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
Vinyl Environmental Council
|
||||||||||||
The Kanto construction waste association, along with Dowa Mining and Vinyl Environmental Council (VEC) agreed in July last year to start from this year a model project to recycle mixed plastic wastes including PVC that are discharged from the construction sector. The amount of by-products that are generated from building houses and buildings are falling each year since construction companies are trying to curb such emission and these by-products are sorted at the building site. However, construction wastes to be generated from the future renovation and demolition of buildings and housings that had been built during the Japanese economic boom between the mid 50s to the early 70s are expected to increase. Our project aims to boost the recycling rates of plastics used as construction materials in various applications. So many kinds of plastic wastes generate from the construction sector and it is hard to distinguish them, and there had been no choice but to landfill them. We would like to contribute to building a recycle oriented society by promoting recycling of these mixed plastic wastes as is. Since the year before the last, the 3 parties jointly conducted a thermal recycling demonstration by using representative samples of mixed plastic wastes from the construction sector at the Kosaka smelter belonging to the Dowa Mining group. It was demonstrated that it is technically feasible to treat such wastes. This year, mixed plastic wastes from the construction sector supplied by the Kanto construction waste association will continuously be recycled at the Okayama plant of Dowa Mining. This is to demonstrate that various plastic wastes from the construction sector including PVC products can actually be thermally recycled, and to set up a social system. Today we have reached a full scale model project, after the launching and preparation since July last year. Our model project's goal is commercialization, and we intend to test a wide range of plastic wastes from this sector in vast amounts for an extended period of time. We will check the below points which previously had not been clarified for commercialization, in order to come up with specific conditions for implementation.
|