廃棄 ペットボトルリサイクル、循環経済に届かず 気ままなリライト171
Although recycling PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles is frequently praised for its potential to reduce energy use and minimize plastic waste, its financial viability remains a significant obstacle. Despite substantial subsidies that help offset the high costs of collection, sorting, and processing, the industry has yet to develop a self-sustaining, circular economic model. As it stands, the current rationale for recycling falls short of creating a truly circular economy—one that integrates both financial sustainability and recycling efficiency.
The Japanese government has been investing heavily in the recycling industry to strengthen the country's resilience against environmental challenges, such as resource conservation and pollution reduction. Through targeted subsidies, these investments have driven significant advancements in recycling technology. One notable innovation is a process that allows disposed PET bottles to be recycled back into bottle-grade resin—a breakthrough that previously limited recycled PET to lower-grade applications like textiles. These subsidies have enabled major recycling companies to expand their facilities and increase their capacity for processing waste bottles. For instance, in 2023, Far Eastern Ishizuka Green PET Corporation, a leading recycling company located in Ibaraki Prefecture, opened Japan’s largest PET recycling plant in Himeji City, Hyogo Prefecture. This facility has the capacity to process 150,000 tons of PET bottles annually, surpassing the 120,000-ton capacity of the company's Tokyo facility.
The government’s subsidies for the recycling industry aim to address a major limitation in recycling efficiency: the significant cost gap between processing recycled materials and producing new resin from petrochemical feedstocks. Recycling PET plastic involves labor-intensive steps—such as sorting, cleaning, and reprocessing—that add substantial expense to the process. Achieving the high quality needed for food-grade recycled PET requires even more processing, further increasing costs compared with the relatively low-cost production of new resin, which benefits from streamlined, highly efficient methods that can spread costs over large volumes. By contrast, virgin PET enjoys a stable market with consistent demand, which keeps prices low through predictability and reliability. While recycled PET avoids the energy-intensive extraction and refining stages required for new resin, it faces fluctuating demand and sometimes stricter quality standards, both of which drive up costs.
Despite these subsidies, competition among recycling companies has continued to create financial pressures, complicating the government’s efforts to make recycled PET cost-competitive with virgin PET. Often this has left recycling companies to shoulder these burdens on their own. Through biannual auctions, recycling companies bid on PET bottles collected by the Japan Containers and Packaging Recycling Association from municipalities, which gather them from households. As recycling companies expand their processing capacity to boost efficiency, competition for auctioned volumes intensifies. A representative from one recycling company noted, “As a capital-intensive industry, we can’t operate without securing sufficient material.” In the first half of fiscal 2024, Far Eastern Ishizuka Green PET Corporation won over 64,514 tons of PET bottles, accounting for more than 60% of the total auctioned volume. Other companies, facing reduced volumes in this period, responded by raising their bid prices in the second half to 84,548 yen per ton—almost double the previous year’s price and the highest level in two years. This price surge was last seen in the second half of fiscal 2022 when the cost of imported crude oil surged due to the military conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The high bid prices are now squeezing the profits of recycling companies. If recycled resin prices continue to rise as companies pass on these higher material costs to buyers, buyers may opt for cheaper virgin resin, prioritizing cost savings over environmental concerns.