DOWA Eco-System Co., Ltd.
We are contributing to building a resource-recycling society by promoting such recycling on a global basis with our advanced technologies and business in Asia. We established a new recycling business of home electric appliances in Tianjin and Jiangxi, China last year. I participated in the Tripartite Environment Ministers Meeting of Korea, China and Japan held in Busan this April and delivered a presentation as a representative of our industry forum. In the presentation I announced a scheme to more effectively recycle resources by combining our businesses in Asia.
We are committed to further deploying business, focusing on Asia.
We claim to be a technology-oriented company. We strive to increase the variety of our environmental business activities by improving our core technologies as mentioned below and expanding our business areas. Examples are detoxification of minor PCB wastes and recycling of Li-ion batteries we started last year. We believe that we can play an indispensable role in resource-recycling and environmental improvement in Asia as we have such environmental technologies that are cost effective and can strictly control environmental risks.
President Kenichi Sasaki
Address: 1781-3 Nitte, Honjo-shi, Saitama Prefecture, 367-0002
Employees: 43 in Higashi Nihon plant/95 in ECOSYSTEM-RECYCLING (as of the end of March 2010)
ECOSYSTEM-RECYCLING HIGASHI NIHON is a recycling plant for precious metals. Metal scraps are recovered not only from used products but also from the production process wastes. We mainly offer services to collect gold, silver, and platinum from the scrap of electronic materials and parts, and from scraping off precious metals plated on appliances in the metal plating process that we receive from our customers and wash the appliances.
Two methods are used for recycling of metals: Pryometallurgical and hydrometallurgical processes. We use hydrometallurgical process that extracts metals of high purity from high-grade raw materials rich in the desired metals.
DOWA has built a resource-recycling business model within the group with smelting and refining plants and hydrometallurgical recycling plants in Akita Prefecture. Through cooperation within the group, we have built links among the resource-recycling flow where various precious and rare metals are being recycled.
Diversified recycling materials
Among precious metal recycling materials, there are some parts that are coated with more than one metal, such as aluminum and gold or stainless steel and platinum, firmly intermingled. As we have technologies to extract metals from such complex recycling materials and know-how to combine chemicals properly, we can effectively recycle materials that are difficult to handle.
It is important to analyze how much metals are contained in appliances before recycling precious metals from them. As we have DOWA Technology, an analysis and research institute on our company premises, we can always make reliable analysis of recycling materials. As small lots are handled in the hydrometallurgical process, and analysis is made for each lot, no sampling deviation occurs.
As those DOWA technologies and know-how enable us to shorten the time up to a few weeks to generate the end-products, we can respond quickly to short life-cycle materials such as electronic materials.
Yuki Nagamura, the Technology Section
Along with the record-making gold and silver prices of the year, we have started to more often handle low quality materials and those that are difficult to handle.
Competition among recycling agents are being intensified. Responding to these circumstances, we are committed to developing new technologies to extract precious metals from base materials without damage them, to collecting precious metals from scrap that has been discarded, and to improving our collection process in order to reduce in-process stocks. We succeeded in developing new collection technology of gold, platinum and palladium from raw materials that we have not tried before and are now striving to stabilize this technology.
We are engaged in promoting Kaizen (Improvement) activities in which employees think on their own. These activities first started as “2 S” activities (Seiri, Seiton – put things in order). We officially started the initiative in 2008 and the activities spread widely over various areas, including streamlining of procedures, layout improvement that results in better work performance and improvement of ordering and administration statuses of fittings and appliances. Now we see improved work performance and productivity. The number of proposals is increasing and we saw more than 100 proposals made within two months. These Kaizen activities aim at improvement by each employee without spending money on fittings and appliances. Through the activities, each employee can actually feel that his/her achievement pushes the level of the organization up, contributing to raising awareness of each employee.
Susumu Arai, Leader of the Production Billing and Collection group
At the beginning I wasn't quite sure whether it was going well or not. However, we implemented the TPS (Toyota Production System) and dramatically changed the layout of our facilities to improve the flow on our lines. After we saw the actual result, we came to be aware of the importance of improved work performance. This changed our attitudes. We found many unneeded steps in our ordinary work procedures. Now we are willing to challenge new problems.
We have learned that although each individual’s improvement is only a small step forward, if such small steps continue and accumulate, on the whole it will become a great step toward improvement. We will continue our efforts steadily together.
We position our human resources as important management resources and we hold study sessions targeted for all employees three times a month. We hold these study sessions as programs to respect aspiration and ambition of each employee and develop him/her as a resource who can deliver high added value to our company. In the sessions we deliver a wide range of lectures on our mental health efforts and our company history, in addition to educating employees on skills necessary for work, including safety, risk abatement, conservation and improvement of processes.
