Shiseido Company, Limited, SEKISUI CHEMICAL CO., LTD., and Sumitomo Chemical Co., Ltd. will start a joint initiative to establish a circular economy for plastic cosmetics containers, in which used cosmetics plastic containers are collected, converted to resources and materials without sorting, and recycled back into plastic cosmetics containers.

 

Cosmetics containers are made from a wide variety of plastics as their importance is placed on protection of contents, ease of use, and design. Therefore, sorting cosmetic containers for recycling is difficult, posing a significant challenge in recycling them into plastic resources. To solve this issue, Shiseido, SEKISUI CHEMICAL, and Sumitomo Chemical have agreed to work together to build a new system to collect used plastic cosmetics containers and recycle them back into new cosmetics containers, leveraging their respective expertise.

 

Shiseido will introduce a new scheme to collect plastic cosmetics containers through retail stores and use recycled polyolefin for its cosmetics containers. SEKISUI CHEMICAL will utilize the “BR ethanol technology” to convert used plastics into ethanol, a raw material for plastics, by turning combustible waste into gas without sorting, and converting the gas into ethanol using microbes. Meanwhile, Sumitomo Chemical will manufacture ethylene from that ethanol by using a technology for converting renewable ethanol into ethylene, and produce, from the ethylene, polyolefin products with quality equivalent to conventional polyolefin using fossil resources.

 

The three companies will advance this cross-sectoral alliance, while also calling on related industries and companies to join in the effort, and strive to create a circular economy.