Nippon Steel & Sumikin Chemical Company and Ricoh jointly developed the reclaimed material that improves both fire retard attributes and strength. Although the quality of plastic materials generally deteriorates with each regeneration, the development of a recycled material that maintains quality even if it’s repeatedly regenerated was achieved. Ricoh is promoting environmental management within its mid-term and long-term environmental impact reduction goals in the fields of Energy Conservation, Resource Conservation and Recycling, and Pollution Prevention. Among these, in Resource Conservation and Recycling, its goal is to reduce the amount of new input resources required at the time of product manufacturing by 25% by 2020, compared to fiscal year 2007, and 87.5% by 2050. Regarding plastics, Ricoh has already begun using biomass materials. Also, it has developed closed-loop reprocessed plastic materials – such as the development of the recycled material with an increased percentage of recovered material. In other areas, Ricoh has jointly developed electric steel plates for MFP components from steel scrap with Tokyo Steel Manufacturing Co. Ltd. These plates have already been successfully used in its MFPs.
By expanding of use of recycled material created by using commercially recovered plastic materials, which can be regenerated repeatedly, Ricoh will also reduce the petroleum used, which is directly extracted from the earth. Ricoh will start to use this material for paper trays and continue to look for other applications, and will increase the use of such materials on office imaging devices as well.