Railway Company Kintetsu Recycles Commuter Passes

On March 20, 2003, Kinki Nippon Railway Co., known in Japan as Kintetsu, together with Teijin Fibers, a manufacturer of polyester fiber, and Teijin DuPont Films Japan, a manufacturer of polyester films, introduced a new system to recycle used Kintetsu commuter passes and prepaid cards back into polyester raw materials. This is the first such initiative among railway companies in Japan.

Used polyester-film tickets and cards collected at Kintetsu stations amount to some 2 million pieces annually, or about 3.6 tonnes. In the past were treated as industrial waste and incinerated. In the newly-developed recycling system, however, they are transformed with the help of advanced refining technology into dimethyl terephthalate (DMT), having the same purity as DMT manufactured from petroleum.

With recycling conducted this way, the material can be reused an unlimited number of times. For the time being, recovered DMT is used as materials for Teijin's polyethylene terephthalate (PET) recycled fiber.

The new system has made "film-to-fiber" recycling possible. In the future, however, the companies intend to complete the process of "film-to-film" recycling, by producing polyester film from used commuter passes and convert them back into commuter passes.



Posted: 2003/06/02 09:12:55 AM
Japanese version