Recyclable design  (Ricoh/Japan)
Recyclable design is an essential approach to promoting resource conservation and product recycling. To introduce recyclable design, an organization that is now known as the Recycling Technology Workshop was established in 1993. The workshop formulated the company's first recyclable design policy based on the Comet Circle, and has built up know-how in various areas, such as grading of materials, strength design with future reuse taken into consideration, reuse of high value-added parts, recycling of high-quality materials,
improvement of ease of disassembling and sorting, and strength design for reducing packaging materials. After designing copiers and printers, designers carry out recyclable design self-assessments to make necessary improvements, and in this way, designers' consideration to recycling has already become a part of their core design process. In addition, we hold a recyclable design seminar twice a year to discuss how to deal with revised rules and new laws and regulations.
The participants include designers of not only Ricoh's design division but also of its Group companies and suppliers, and in fiscal 2008, seminars were held in February and August, attracting about 60 attendees in total.
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Promotion of recycled copier business  (Ricoh Group/Global)
Ricoh copiers are offered mainly for lease in Japan, and every leased copier is placed under our management. This system facilitates the collection of used machines, and allows us to effectively utilize resources.
The know-how accumulated through this practice is also made available in countries where the business model differs from that of Japan to help develop their recycling system. However, the collection of used machines requires energy- and cost-consuming transportation, and therefore,
if collected products are not effectively utilized, collection will only create substantial losses. Ricoh has adopted resource conservation and recycling as one of the pillars of its environmental conservation activities since the early 1990s, and has been working on the recycling of collected copiers, laser printers, toner cartridges, and supplies.
More than 200,000 units of our used products are collected each year, and fully recycled* or reused. Furthermore, in order to continuously promote recycling, it is also necessary to create economic value from recycling. Ricoh therefore has been engaged in recycling copiers in Japan by collecting used machines from the market and relaunching them back to market.
Since the release of its first recycled copier in 2001, Ricoh has expanded its lineup more actively than any other company to offer a wide variety of recycled machines with a copying productivity ranging—
as of fiscal 2008—from 35 pages per minute to 75pp/min. Ricoh is also planning to release its first recycled color copier in 2009.
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- The recycling rate of copiers is more than 99.5%.
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Improvement of recycling quality with recycling information system
(Ricoh/Japan)
In addition to product information from the procurement of materials to sales, the Ricoh Group also controls information on each of office equipment unit after sales using the recycling information system. Ricoh's recycling information system is an original traceability system designed specifically for collection and recycling purposes, whereby each unit collected is bar-coded to trace its status throughout the process.
The conditions of copiers used by customers are also recorded in the monitoring database within the system. The system allows efficient production and quality improvement of recycled products due to its ability to manage on a individual unit basis,
enabling identification of which collected items are currently going through which process. Used copiers are first collected by Ricoh's local sales subsidiaries/dealers or our Green Centers located in 11 cities across Japan,
and sorted by model and quality level at Aggregation Centers to determine whether each collected machine will be recycled or dismantled for parts reuse or material recycling. Only products that have passed rigorous inspections are finally sent to recovery centers. At recovery centers, used products are examined again to note their condition (quality, deterioration, etc.), and then disassembled, cleaned, and washed. Data stored in the hard disc is also erased.
In the assembling process, deteriorated parts and supplies are replaced with new ones. Assembled products then go through paper feeding tests, fine-tuning, and a finishing process before shipped to ensure they meet the same standards as those for regular products. The finished recycled products are provided with the same quality warranty as that for new products.
Recycling process for copiers
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imagio Neo 753RC/603RC received the Sustainable Design Award
(Ricoh/Japan)
In fiscal 2008, imagio Neo 753RC/603RC, Ricoh's recycled multifunctional digital copiers, received the Sustainable Design Award, a new award category established as part of the Good Design Awards presented by the Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization (JIDPO).
The Sustainable Design Award is given to products recognized for their prominent roles in the realization of a sustainable society in view of current global environmental problems. The reasons for selecting the imagio Neo 753RC/603RC according to JIDPO were because they reflect Ricoh's devoted,
globally outstanding commitment to the recycling of collected products; their overall shape is straightforward and simple; overall build and finishing are sound; and the operability of the interface and maintainability are high.
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