Efforts to extend product life include making longer lasting liquid-crystal backlight, hard disk, and so on for personal computers, for example. For automobiles, the specified times for replacing engine oil, engine coolant, and so on have been extended.

Reuse has priority over recycling because the former uses less additional energy and causes less environmental contamination than the latter. Efforts to reuse products include reusing copy machine parts. Internal parts such as the drive device and exposure devices have been reused for some time; but more recently external parts are increasingly becoming the focus for reuse because technology for scraping stains off the surface by blasting grains at high speeds has been developed.

For the slot game machine, a structure by which it can be separated into the upper component (rotating component) and the lower component (housing) has been adopted. For new models using this structure, only the upper component is replaced while the lower component is reused, thus reducing the resources used to produce the new model.

Furthermore, for automobiles, components taken from end-of-life vehicles are used as a base and reassembled with new parts to replace worn and deteriorated parts, and checked for quality to recover their original function.

## (2) Product design for recycling

Techniques in the design stage to improve the ease of decomposition of products and the possibility of making them into resources again in the recycling stage have been developed. Such technologies are called “environmentally conscious design”, which are combined with waste-reducing and waste-reusing technologies.

Of such techniques, the ease of decomposition reduces the labor and time for decomposing used products and contributes to their reuse and recycling.

Such designs for containers or packagings involve changing composite materials to a single material, using shrink labels with a perforated line for easier removal, using recycled materials, and introducing biodegradable materials.

For home appliances, an example of techniques implemented is the introduction of product assessment where the producer researches a product to predict its safety, resources used and environmental effect in the stages of production, distribution, usage, disposal, recycling/processing, and final disposal, and in the stage of design before it is put into the production. There are cases of ease of decomposition design where parts that could only be decomposed by means of special tools have been made decomposable using common tools and where parts are labeled to indicate their materials so that those of the same material can be treated accordingly when they are decomposed. (Fig. 2-23)

For the production of automobiles, there are cases where recycled materials or recyclable resources are used for recycling and where components of the body are structured for easier disassembly to

Fig. 2-24 Environment-conscious design of a hybrid car

Examples of adopting structures using a recycled material or a recyclable resource that are easy to dismantle for body parts or has a better-for-dismantlement mark attached.

Source: Toyota Motor Corporation

Fig. 2-23 Environmentally conscious design of a washing machine

For disassembly, it was necessary to prepare a tool with a special size.

Source: Mitsubishi Electric Corporation

With this bolt, this can be disassembled with a common tool.