Recycling policy

Recycling is a major part of Sharp’s environmental policy. The company aims to reduce waste going to landfill sites to minimise the potential effect on the environment. Sharp has developed a new technology for recycling plastic that uses a “closed loop methodology” allowing plastic to maintain its characteristics, even after being recycled several times, which is then reused in our products.

Recycling legislation in Japan and in Europe means we are legally required to recycle the waste from the products we manufacture. Our aim however is to surpass the minimum legal requirements. Sharp’s recycling is based on three concepts:

• To improve the recycling rate and aim for zero land fill disposal
• To improve the efficiency of the recycling system to reduce recycling costs
• To incorporate recycling technologies into the development and design of products

Sharp owns the largest share of the Kansai Recycling plant in Japan, which recycles four categories of appliances namely: air conditioners, TVs, refrigeration and washing machines and recently IT equipment.

We have built a second recycling plant with a capacity to recycle 500,000 TVs a year.

As a result the recycling rates have far exceeded the legal requirements of recycling legislation in Japan.

In addition Sharp is engaged in recycling MFPs and PCs.  At the end of each model’s life cycle, all collected MFPs undergo evaluation and any found to have minor defects are re-built and re-used. The remainder are recycled.

In 2006, 33,000 MFPs were recovered which represents a 25% increase against the previous year. In the same year, around 695,000 waste toner cartridges were collected - an increase of 38% over the previous year. Amongst these 250,000 were remanufactured, an increase of 2% against previous year.

In Europe Sharp co-founded Repic, the largest compliance scheme approved by the UK Environment Agency, to collect, treat and recycle waste generated from electrical and electronic equipment.