Educative activities to promote closed-loop recycling of PET bottles in collaboration with companies and an industry association

Members, their roles, and reason for cooperation

Japan Airport Terminal Group (Japan Airport Terminal Co., Ltd., Tokyo International Air Terminal Corporation):

Concept development, overall project planning, operation and management, coordination with relevant parties, public relations

Japan Soft Drink Association:

Concept development, planning and organization of educative activities, public relations

《Point of this collaboration》

Japan Airport Terminal Group has set a KPI to ‘Closed-loop recycling of all PET bottles collected at terminals ’, which it is working to achieve by 2025.　

　Japan Soft Drink Association (JSDA) aims to realize a ‘circular and ecological economy’. Specifically, it has set a target of a 50% bottle-to-bottle ratio by 2030 and is working with local governments and businesses on various initiatives.

Time started

November 2023 to present.

Technology and business model

The collection of PET bottles can be broadly categorized into 'Households related route collection', where they are discharged from homes, and 'Business related route collection', where they are collected from offices, factories and next to vending machines. PET bottles collected from households are easily recycled by sorting them into three parts segregation recycling (caps, labels and bottles), while bottles collected by 'Business related route' are often contaminated with foreign particles and not sorted into three parts segregation.

Japan Airport Terminal Group is promoting initiatives of closed-loop recycling of PET bottles: All PET bottles collected at terminals as resources, are recycled back into new PET bottles.

Also, JSDA promotes closed-loop recycling of PET bottles, and set the goal of increasing closed-loop recycling ratio to more than 50% by 2030. Therefore, the direction of the two parties matched, which led to collaborative initiatives.

Japan Airport Terminal Group previously collected cans, glass bottles and PET bottles in the same recycling boxes, but has installed new ‘PET bottle only recycling boxes,’ also set up panels with educative message (RBs with the educative message panel) to encourage users to properly segregate the three parts of bottles. The two organized an educative event ‘Recycle at Haneda ～PET bottles circle back to PET bottles～’ in November 2023.

Achievements and goals

Approximately 450 people visited the event on Saturday and Sunday during this event, which provided an opportunity to communicate the need to separate the three parts segregation recycling of PET bottles and the efforts of the Japan Airport Terminal Group, leading to the segregation and discharge of PET bottles by users, who only put bottles into RBs with the educative message panel. The two will continue to promote initiatives in the future.

Reference URL

https://www.tokyo-airport-bldg.co.jp/site_resource/information/pdf/000013958.pdf

https://www.j-sda.or.jp/news/2023/10/30/post-76/