Last month, Japan’s Ministry of the Environment announced the results of its selection process for a model program targeting household plastic waste, in which material recycling operators and chemical recycling operators collaborate to improve recycling quality and yield. The ministry accepted applications from July 17 to September 1, 2026, and selected six projects after screening applicant documents and other materials.
Four Projects Using Material Recycling Residues as Feedstock for Chemical Recycling
Of the six selected projects, four involve using residues remaining after material recycling or materials still at an intermediate processing stage as feedstock for chemical recycling. Among these, Toyama Kankyo Seibi Co., Ltd. and Fukui Kankyo Jigyo Co., Ltd. will also verify whether the chemical recycling side can accept such materials.
- Veolia Genets Co., Ltd.: The company will verify whether a catalytic cracking method can efficiently convert intermediate-stage material—generated from material recycling residues and not previously put to effective use as a resource—back into olefins at a high yield, enabling efficient, high-quality recycling.
- JEPLAN, Inc.: The company will break down PET in particular, among material recycling residues, down to the molecular level of its raw materials, and examine whether this raises the quality of recycled material and overall yield on the material recycling side. It will also verify whether high-quality recycled material usable for non-food applications can be produced, how recycling costs change, and what mutual benefits arise from combining the two methods, with the quality of the recycled material to be evaluated by actual users.
- Toyama Kankyo Seibi Co., Ltd.: The company will test whether intermediate-stage material and residues left over after material recycling can be fed into chemical recycling (oil conversion) equipment that turns plastic into oil, and confirm the yield and potential for material recovery across the group as a whole. It will jointly verify, within the group, target and upper-limit values for contaminants to be avoided upon acceptance, and will also confirm how recycling costs actually change.
- Fukui Kankyo Jigyo Co., Ltd.: The company will evaluate whether pellets made from recycled polystyrene material can be used as feedstock for chemical recycling that breaks materials down to the molecular level, and whether residues generated during the material recycling process can be accepted as chemical recycling feedstock. Based on this, it will carry out actual processing to verify yield, quality, and costs.
Two Projects Verifying Overall Effectiveness of Combining and Differentiating Methods
The remaining two projects will verify how much overall effectiveness can be achieved by combining and differentiating between the two recycling methods.
- MM Plastic Co., Ltd.: Operators with different recycling methods will form a group to confirm whether the quality and yield of containers and packaging plastic recycling can be improved, and whether collaboration across the value chain and the recycling industry can advance. The project will present numerical figures for the improvement in the material recovery rate, the yield of each process, and the additional costs incurred.
- Nippon Steel Recycling Co., Ltd.: Through material recycling, the company will carefully select feedstock to produce high-quality recycled material, while feedstock unsuitable for high-quality recycling will be converted into high-quality recycled materials such as polystyrene and ABS resin using the coke-oven chemical feedstock conversion method. The project will verify how much this differentiated approach can increase both the overall volume of material recovered and the output of high-quality recycled material.
Background to the Model Program
Under the bidding system for sorted collection of plastic containers and packaging based on the Containers and Packaging Recycling Act (容器包装リサイクル法), the Ministry of the Environment is considering a revision that would allow material recycling operators and chemical recycling operators to form groups and jointly take part in bids. The aim of this model program is to verify, in practice, the improvements in quality and yield achieved through collaboration among multiple operators, as well as the resulting changes in recycling costs, and to build up examples of such collaboration.
【Reference】Results of Selection for the Fiscal Year 2026 Model Program on Improving Quality and Yield through Joint Material and Chemical Recycling of Plastics
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