Recycling Economy

Our delegation visited the NKRC plant in the KitaKyushu Eco Town on last Friday. The Managing Director, who happened to work in Malaysia few years ago greeted us in Malay. That particular moment has everyone the feel at home, i think.

NKRC is a recycling plant for home appliances, focusing onto the fridge, TV, air-con, washing machines and also the plasma TV and wash drier after April this year. There are all together 49 such plants in Japan. A total of 724,000 set of appliances was recycled each year and NKRC accounted for 7% from the total. Home Appliances recycling is made possible with the Government introduced the Home Appliances Recycling Law in year 2001. The Law requires every user to pay for a fee during disposal of the appliances. The fee is varied according to type of appliances with refrigerator being charged the most. Users are required to deposit with the retailers or to send it to the designated centres. The fee will then collected by a specially established association formed by the manufacturer. Fees collected will be paid to the recycling factories. The fee collected is accounted for 60% of the total income of the plant with the balance generated from the sale of recycled items such as copper, iron, aluminium, plastic etc.

One of the interesting terminology mentioned during the briefing was Recycling Economy. Japanese is exploring new businesses, and thus new type of resources for their economic activities. Since the country is export-oriented and resources are needed for manufacturing, sourcing of appropriate resources and optimising the life cycle of resources is always a challenge. Acknowledging their constraint on getting new source of resources and the escalating high price, the Japanese is exploring the Recycling Economy - that is to extract the resources from the waste, to reuse the recyclable items for new material and to manufacture new products with recycling materials. The supply chain of resources and manufacturing has opened up employment in the new sector, the green business. The recycling economy has also provided more opportunities for research and development by the institutions. The Recycling Economy has even brought in visitors, a boost for tourism sector in KitaKyushu City. This has opened up chances for Japanese to export their expertise and skills on this sector.

It is not surprising to note that Japanese Government, Central and Local are actively promoting Recycling Economy. They have taken on the right move, a niece market for exploration. Since waste is unwanted resources by many, securing it with minimum cost will eventually increase the profit margin, and competitiveness. Well, waste dump is a real hidden gold mine, at least to the Japanese. For Malaysian to have an effective 3R program, perhaps we should change our underlying objective for recycling campaign, that's moving away from the environmental protection to business sense, the Recycling Economy.