3R Initiatives

The term “3R” is derived from the first letters of the three keywords for building a recycling society—reduce, reuse, and recycle.
JATCO designs and develops its products to ensure that they can be used for as long as possible, thus aiming for reductions in waste. JATCO also reuses usable parts from products that have been recovered from the marketplace. Finally, JATCO uses recyclable materials then recycles them into new resources. By doing so, JATCO ensures that it is contributing to the realization of a recycling-oriented society.

JATCO aims to reduce the amount of waste products per unit it produces by 50% by 2050 (compared to 2016).

Wastewater discharged from our manufacturing plants and offices is sent to in-house water treatment facilities, treated into safe water, and then discharged into rivers. However, liquid release agent or liquid waste with large amounts of oil or sediment, cannot be treated to safe levels at water treatment facilities, so they have been processed externally as waste.
Therefore, to make it possible to treat the liquid waste, we repeatedly reviewed the chemicals used and our purification methods, and reduced the amount of liquid release agent and liquid waste with large amounts of oil or sediment by 70%.

Due to the complicated shapes of the molds used in the die-casting and forging processes at JATCO, production had previously been carried out using electro-discharge machining. Today, however, we are moving toward direct carving with direct machining at the machining center. By improving the machining program and the cutting conditions, we have significantly reduced machining time and the amount of industrial waste generated.

As part of our efforts to improve our loading ratio, which contributes to a reduction in the number of trucks used, JATCO is taking steps to improve the packing density of purchased parts for delivery.
Plastic containers and plastic cushioning material used to protect products during transportation and storage that had become unusable as a result of deterioration or product changes had previously been disposed of as industrial waste. However, after 2004, JATCO began reusing this material for other products. We have also gained the cooperation of companies engaged in the production of plastic to help us further reduce the waste we generate, such as by recycling our plastics into raw materials.

JATCO has been developing its remanufacturing technologies since 1989 as part of its CVT/AT unit reuse business. Remanufacturing involves recovering used CVT and AT units produced by our company from the maintenance shops of automotive dealers. These are then disassembled, cleaned and inspected, with components exchanged as required. After reassembly, a functionality test is performed to ensure an after-sales product that is no different in quality from a brand-new product, despite being used. This system allows for products to be offered to automotive users at a very affordable price. Our inspection standards have led to a PDCA cycle that has created an increase in demand for remanufactured parts. This has led to lower resource and energy use, thereby contributing to reduced CO₂ emissions and the mitigation of global warming. By adding inspection items specifically for the used parts and confirming the functionality of the parts using the same tests performed on our mass-produced new parts, we can ensure a level of quality equivalent to a new part. JATCO is also designing its products to make them both easy to reuse and repair, thereby increasing the proportion of recovered CVT/AT units that can be reused. Furthermore, by performing detailed inspections of our recovered parts, we can feed these results back into our product development, thereby further improving product quality. This initiative has been praised for its major contributions to the efficient use of environmental resources, and received the Director-General’s Award of the Japan Environmental Management Association for Industry of the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry at the FY2017 Resource Recycling Technologies and Systems Awards (hosted by the Japan Environmental Management Association for Industry with backing from the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry). JATCO currently performs its remanufacturing in Japan (for the Japanese and European markets) and Mexico (for the North American market), while also coordinating with local repair companies in China, thereby working to improve its 3R initiatives globally. JATCO will continue to expand these operations globally, thereby contributing to a higher-level of global environmental protection.