What Happens After Home Appliances Are Recycled? Discovering the Future of a Circular Economy at PETEC
Where do refrigerators and televisions go once they’ve reached the end of their useful lives?
The home appliances that support our daily lives do not simply become waste once they have served their purpose. Many are reborn as resources and put to use again in different forms. At the Panasonic Eco Technology Center (PETEC) in Kato City, Hyogo Prefecture, visitors can see and learn how Japan’s circular economy works in practice.
Located in a rural area surrounded by rice fields, PETEC is a home appliance recycling plant that began operations in 2001, the same year Japan’s Home Appliance Recycling Law (HARL) came into effect. The plant is guided by the slogan, “product to product.” PETEC approaches recycling as a kind of treasure hunt, searching used home appliances for valuable resources and recovering materials that can be used to make new products.
Learning how Japan’s home appliance recycling system works
PETEC was designed from the outset to welcome visitors. In addition to exhibition areas, the plant has dedicated observation corridors, allowing visitors to safely view the entire home appliance recycling process.
The tour begins with a classroom-style lecture by the plant staff. Before entering the plant itself, visitors first learn about Japan’s home appliance recycling system. The lecture explains the social background that led to the introduction of home appliance recycling, the way consumers, retailers, manufacturers, and government bodies work together to support the system, and the recycling results achieved to date. This gives visitors a solid foundation for understanding how home appliance recycling works in Japan.
The tour then continues to an exhibition area, where visitors can look inside home appliances and examine samples of the materials used in them. Through concrete examples, such as what kinds of metals are found inside air conditioners and what characteristics distinguish the plastics used in washing machines, visitors can see that home appliances are made from a wide range of different materials. The exhibition also introduces the concept of urban mining, which views used home appliances as an “urban mine” rich in valuable metals and other resources. Visitors learn how the reuse of recovered materials can reduce the need for extracting virgin raw materials.
By first learning about the structure and materials of home appliances, visitors can more easily picture how these products are dismantled, sorted, and reused as resources. This makes the plant tour that follows more engaging and easier to understand.
Seeing home appliances dismantled up close
The plant tour then begins.
From the observation corridor, visitors can watch workers dismantle home appliances on lines organized according to product type and structure.
They can see the back covers of televisions being removed so circuit boards can be taken out, and the internal parts of washing machines being efficiently removed one after another. As visitors watch these processes up close, the plant staff provide detailed explanations. It is impressive to watch used home appliances being transformed into valuable resources. Monitors installed along the observation corridor also make it easier to see more detailed work. Looking inside products that people rarely get to see in everyday life can change the way visitors view the appliances around them.
After the manual dismantling process is complete, the remaining parts are sent to enormous shredders. From this point on, the process moves beyond human hands and into a stage where various technologies are used to sort the recovered resources.
Learning how resources are sorted through demonstration machines
Once the appliances have been shredded, the next question is how materials such as iron, copper, aluminum, and plastic are separated. At PETEC, demonstration machines are used to show this process in a way that is easy to understand.
Small-scale models recreate technologies used in the actual recycling process, including equipment that uses air to separate light and heavy materials, magnets to recover iron, and infrared light to identify different types of plastic. After seeing these demonstration machines, visitors can look at the plant equipment and understand, “That machine is doing the same job as the demonstration I just saw.” By combining exhibits with the plant tour, PETEC makes even the complex mechanisms of recycling feel clear and accessible.
Recycling backed by manufacturing expertise
One of PETEC’s defining features is that Panasonic, a manufacturer that makes home appliances, is also involved in recycling them after use. Because the company that makes the products also handles dismantling and resource recovery, insights from the recycling process can be fed back into future product development. Questions such as which materials are easier to reuse after recycling and what kinds of designs make parts easier to remove can be reflected in the next generation of products.
PETEC places particular emphasis on plastic recycling. The plant operates a horizontal (closed-loop) recycling system in which recovered plastics are reused in new home appliances. The careful recovery of plastics from used home appliances and the creation of a system that allows them to be used repeatedly is one of the notable features of home appliance recycling in Japan.
By returning not only metals but also plastics to product manufacturing, PETEC demonstrates a manufacturer’s approach to recycling: recovering materials and returning them to manufacturing processes where possible.
Looking beyond disposal as a way to think about the future
To help more people understand the importance of recycling, PETEC offers its plant tours free of charge. The plant also maintains regular dialogue with local residents and works with the surrounding community while supporting initiatives related to resource circulation.
PETEC is not simply a place where waste is processed. It is a working site of resource circulation, where used home appliances are put back to use as resources and the knowledge gained from that process is applied to future product manufacturing. A visit to the plant offers more than a chance to learn about the technologies and systems that support a resource-circulating society. It also provides a valuable opportunity to reconsider the relationship between our own lives and the resources we use. Learning what happens to home appliances after we are finished with them is also a way of thinking about the society of the future.
- ■Tour Days
Tuesday to Friday, excluding public holidays, Golden Week, Obon, and the New Year holidays.
Availability can be checked on the reservation calendar on the official website.
Japanese only: https://panasonic.co.jp/eco/petec/entry/ - ■Tour times
10:00–11:30
13:30–15:00 - ■Duration
90 minutes - ■Group size and languages
Maximum capacity is approximately 60 visitors.
Visitors tour the plant in groups of 10. Since tours are conducted in Japanese, an interpreter must be arranged for each group. For example, a group of 60 visitors would need six interpreters.
English and Chinese tour courses are also available, but an accompanying interpreter is still required. - ■Reservations
Advance reservations are required. Reservations must be made at least one week before the tour.
Please reserve through one of the following methods:
1. Through a travel agency by phone in Japanese: 0795-42-8570
2. Through a travel agency by email in Japanese or English:
petec_visit_desk@ml.jp.panasonic.com
3. Through the reservation form on the official website:
Japanese only: https://panasonic.co.jp/eco/petec/entry/ - ■Access
The plant is difficult to reach by public transportation, so visitors need to travel by chartered bus. Please inquire in advance about parking. - ■Website
English: https://panasonic.net/eco/petec/
