Class note; Hosei university graduate school in MBA course in Nov. 21

I would like to write about in the Entrepreneurship Training Course Workshop at Hosei University on November 21.
Speaker: President of a plastic recycling company

Why did you start working on recycling?
My father returned from Papua New Guinea, where he was said to have been wiped out after the war, with nine lives. He was taught that to live was to eat. He also ate grass and insects. He was fortunate that he was hit by a bullet soon after arriving on the island and had to return home. My father then engaged in farming. As the fourth son, he had nothing to inherit, but he worked hard as a day laborer to increase the number of fields. But the speaker, his son, said, "Farming is impossible in Japan because the land is so small. It would be good in Brazil.
The first oil crisis. When I was in middle school.
Second oil crisis 1979. early twenties.
The reason my father went to war was because Japan needed to secure oil.
After the oil shock, the world decided to use as little oil as possible.
He was impressed by the work of the Institute of Engineering and Technology to convert plastic into oil, a national project that started in 1980 and was started as a private sector project at his workplace in 1982.
Short-chain resins could be converted to oil, but polymers like polyethylene became waxy and clogged up in pipes, which didn't work well for a national project.
I was at home shaking a flask until midnight. I went to the Institute of Industrial Technology in Tsukuba twice a week to study.
It attracted a lot of attention, but after the oil crisis ended, he was criticized for its high cost, so he couldn't proceed at his place of work, so he finally quit his job and started his own company.
At first, he made videotapes (made of polyester)
In 1994, a pilot plant was built.
In 2012, we built a dedicated bottle-to-bottle plant.
VHS and Beta were fighting over video tape standards
As a countermeasure against the leak of secrets, Victor was disposing of them in a landfill, while Sony was incinerating them.
I tried to talk to both companies, but they were too cautious and wouldn't let me meet with them, so I would bring them a cup of tea for 2,000 yen every three days and leave it at the reception desk, saying that if I couldn't meet with them, I couldn't give it to them. I suggested that we switch from mass production and mass disposal to recycling, but when asked how many people were working in my company, they found out that I was working alone.
A week later, I visited them again and asked them to meet with me for 10 minutes, and we gradually became acquainted. Finally, Victor entrusted me with the task of unifying the management of the scrap videotapes he had entrusted to me by attaching slips to them and allowing me to visit and inspect them at any time.
The reclaimed products were used for Toyota's interior and carpeting, but we couldn't talk about it publicly before the launch of the Prius for fear of tarnishing our image if the scrap material was used. Now I can tell you.
I managed to make 4 million yen before my 3.5 million yen in original capital was exhausted. Because of the bubble, the banks wanted me to buy land with the money I made, but I refused and saved it to build a factory.
Winning the trust of customers was the key to his success.
Then, due to the strong yen, the Japanese factory moves overseas. What to do about it? Around 1982, the use of plastic bottles for beverages began to increase.
I thought it could be recycled because it was made of C (carbon), O (oxygen) and H (hydrogen) bonds, not coated on the surface like tape. But PET degrades. Once it is heated, it loses 10% of its physical properties (viscosity).
Since PET has been involved in plastic recycling for some time, the government called for it when the Containers and Packaging Recycling Law (1997) was enacted. At that gathering, I was convinced that manufacturers would start doing bottle-to-bottle. If that was the case, I wanted to be the first to do it myself.
To make it easier to recycle, the label was made easier to remove, the cap was changed from aluminum to plastic, and the bottle was lightly washed before refurbishment, and it was exported to China as raw material.
Out of 600,000 tons, 400,000 tons went overseas.
Even if recycled into food trays, they are eventually incinerated.
China joins the WTO. The idea of Asian circulation as well as domestic circulation of resources emerged. The idea is to import minerals from China instead. I want to make it a bottle-to-bottle domestic cycle somehow. It's a waste to send it overseas when Japan has no resources. However, recently China has also started to say that they don't need the waste, and exports are on the decline.
In order to build a large factory. When I went to the bank to ask for a loan, they told me to know my stature. If my explanations didn't work, they wrote a report saying that there was potential in asking a think tank to do a study. The think tank's data would be the basis for the bank's decision.
All the banks were willing to finance the project, but it was fully financed by governmental financial institutions as a national project level.
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) asked me if the Asian circulation was not good enough. The value of domestic circulation was questioned. This time, we conducted a joint study with a think tank that was strong in the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and found that we could reduce CO2 emissions five times compared to the Kyoto Protocol.
After that, we took it to the beverage container industry and were told that no one drinks out of bottles made from waste, so we started with labels. Label from PET, starting with 18㎛. Nowadays, the technology can make films as thin as 9㎛.
Finally, when we consulted with the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, the regulator of food hygiene, they said it was unprecedented, so they came to the factory to check it out and the plastic bottle recycling project was realized.

Technical Challenges
-Removal of stains, odors
-Degradation of physical properties
-Assurance of Safety and Security
Sparse areas sorb dirt when viewed at the molecular level. The ease of sorption depends on the polarity of the molecules. The bottle has a longer molecular length and is more difficult to regenerate.
The world's first bottle to bottle
It not only reduces petroleum resources and CO2 emissions, but it also eliminates waste.
Bottle to bottle means flake to flake.
We have developed a technology to directly preform the flake.
Conventional recycling flow; Bottle -> Flake -> Pellet, Crystallization -> Preform -> Bottle.
New regeneration flow; Bottle to flake, preform to bottle
Eliminate the pellets

Iron scraps, waste paper, waste plastic
We don't need the garbage. Emerging countries don't take over as their economies grow.
The plastic bottle recycling business has invested about 20 billion yen. Then a Taiwanese resin manufacturer came to Japan and spent three to four years to launch it. Only two companies in Japan are currently working on it.
Flake and preform are patented.
Bottle-to-bottle has not been patented, but the company has the know-how to do so, as there has been a precedent for mixing bulking materials in the past.

Company Size
Now that it has grown in scale, it is difficult because it involves the thoughts of many people. In the past, you could move on just because you thought it was interesting.

Collection of the bottle
Of the 600,000 tons, 300,000 tons are recovered by the government. From now on, we will also focus on the collection of retailers.
Plastic bottles hydrolyze quickly. It requires drying.
PET in egg cartons supplies raw materials.

Impact of oil prices
It has been dependent on the price of oil until around 2018.
Since the SDGs and the term "circular economy" came up, there has been quite a bit of interest.
The closer you get to the commodity from the raw materials, such as preforms and fleece, the less affected by the oil price.
The act of recycling itself is starting to become an added value.
Can we recycle not only bottles but also caps?
Structurally, the cap is soft and the bottle is hard, which makes it a tightening mechanism.
Therefore, it becomes a different material at the product stage, but it is difficult to recycle it further. However, the company is cooperating fully with the activities to collect the caps and make them into vaccines.
Expansion of the plastic bottle recycling business beyond companies
When Suntory first started, it decided that it couldn't be done by one company and wanted to spread it to all beverage manufacturers. It also made the information available to its competitors.

On overseas expansion
Recycling is an equipment industry. It is difficult to expand overseas on its own, but it may be possible to do so in collaboration with a beverage manufacturer.

Impressions
I think it is more accurate to think of them as manufacturing companies rather than waste disposal companies.
From the perspective of the equipment industry, it is more profitable to increase the amount of waste collected, so I can understand why they see the outflow of plastic bottles to overseas as a problem. On the other hand, it seems to be difficult for a single company to expand overseas, and the barriers to withdrawal and entry are high.
Regarding the fact that recycling is becoming a value-added activity for PET bottles, when I went to the beverage shelf at my local Aeon, I did not find any special labeling for tea, coffee, and carbonated beverages as to how the bottles themselves are made, but for mineral water, the labeling "Irohasu," "Southern Alps Natural Water," "Irohasu," and "Southern Alps Natural Water" were all listed. There was an ecological statement printed on the bottle on both
http://www.i-lohas.jp/
https://www.suntory.co.jp/water/tennensui/environment/
On the other hand, foreign brands such as "Evian" and "Contrex" were sold at nearly double the price, although the amount of water on display was small. Mineral water seems to be difficult to differentiate on the basis of taste, and if so, the eco-friendly nature of the product would be a selling point. Closer to my work, I feel that this idea could provide some insight into the proliferation of EVs.