A Study on Recycling of Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) Bead-box for Marine Products
Takefumi Nagata, Kenji Yokota, Eiichi Saito, Mitsuhiro Imaizumi
Venture Business Laboratory, Yamagata University
JAPAN

Keywords: Recycling, Expanded polystyrene (EPS), Life cycle assessment (LCA)

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Recently, because of aggravation of global environment problems, development of recycling system for plastic materials is required. Especially, about expanded polystyrene (EPS), which is widely used for bead box for packaging marine products in Japan, the ratio of material recycling (now 40 %, in Japan) should be increased because the environmental load (e. g. the amount of CO2 generation) of EPS is high as compared with other plastic materials. However, many problems, such as inefficiency for collecting and transporting of used EPS bead box, many impurities (e.g. fish bones and some grains of sand) included in collected bead-boxes and bad smell (generated from marine products) left in recycled materials, are still left for development of EPS material recycling.
In this study, a new recycling system for EPS bead-box was developed. The concept of this system is manufacturing food trays by using EPS bead-boxes as recycle materials. At PPS meeting, the detail of the recycling system, life cycle assessment (LCA) analysis of the system and the solutions of the problems mentioned above will be reported.