FUJIFILM Business Innovation Corporation has teamed up with Teijin Limited to establish a horizontal closed-loop recycling scheme for plastic exterior parts used in multifunction printers in Japan. Recycled plastic material recovered from exterior parts of multifunction printers will be reused in exterior parts, including front covers of multifunction printers. Exterior parts made with this recycled plastic material will be adopted for the ApeosPort-VII C R Series and ApeosPort C R Series of the remanufactured machines.
FUJIFILM Business Innovation
FUJIFILM Business Innovation and Teijin Limited establish horizontal closed-loop recycling scheme for plastic exterior parts
There is more attention than ever being paid to the circular use of product materials, including plastics. This is leading to companies needing to advance their resource circulation initiatives to help reduce the consumption of exhaustible resources and minimise waste generation.
In 1995, FUJIFILM Business Innovation established the Closed-Loop System, a resource circulation framework covering the entire product lifecycle from product planning, development and manufacturing through to disposal. The company collects used multifunction printers and regenerates components utilising cleaning and blast processes. The resulting components, including exterior parts, are then reused once they pass quality assurance standards. If parts don’t pass quality testing, due to damage or breakage, they are replaced with new components.
To sustain closed-loop recycling, there needs to be a balance between the volume of materials collected and the volume required for production. By leveraging its own multifunction printer collection network and its remanufacturing system, FUJIFILM Business Innovation has established a horizontal closed-loop recycling scheme where exterior parts recovered from used multifunction printers are recycled into exterior parts for remanufactured machines. This allows exterior parts to be recovered from used multifunction printers, which are then recycled back into the same application while maintaining the required quality.
This initiative sees used multifunction printers collected from the market. To ensure quality requirements are met, metals and other types of plastics are removed from the exterior parts, ensuring only the target plastic materials are recovered. These newly sorted materials are then sent through a wet grinding process to reduce contamination.
Teijin Limited brings its expertise in designing materials for recyclability to this collaboration. The company has also adopted materials for exterior parts that maintain their quality after long-term use and subsequent recycling. The pair’s recycled material, which contains 80% recycled content derived from plastics sorted through FUJIFILM Business Innovation’s collection network, meets the physical properties and colour tone requirements for exterior parts. Utilising Teijin’s compounding technology to restore material properties and adjust colours, the recycled material achieves performance and appearance comparable to virgin material.