The Orwak multi-chamber baler 5070-HDC was selected as the first baler for recycling plastic packaging in the cleaning industry in Japan.
Hakuyosha Co., Ltd., with an impressive history dating back almost 120 years to its founding in 1906, is a pioneer and leading company in Japan’s cleaning industry. It operates nationwide businesses such as clothing cleaning, corporate linen supply, and uniform rental.
The plastic packaging cannot get any thinner, its time to recycle
The cleaning industry is required to reduce waste and recycle plastic hangers and clothing packaging covers (polyethylene) under the Plastic Resource Recycling Promotion Act, which came into effect in Japan in 2022.
Hakuyosha has been reducing the total weight of plastic packaging by making it thinner and converting it to biomass rather than collecting it, but in 2025 they took a step further and started recycling it. It uses the circular supply chain “pool”provided by Recotec Inc., a company that designs recycling solutions. Pool is a system that builds a collection infrastructure by digitizing waste and connecting manufacturers, who want to use recycled materials, with waste producers to design a circular supply chain that ensures traceability.
Plastic packaging waste generated during the automatic packaging process
Yoshinobu Miyagawa, CEO of Soritsu Co., Ltd., a Hakuyosha group company that handles materials and machinery and was involved comments:
“We had reached a limit in thinning plastic packaging, as any thinner packaging would cause errors in automatic packaging machines. While we were exploring our future direction, Recotec’s recycling business was selected as a recipient of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s “Innovative Recycling Technology for Plastic Resource Circulation” award.
“I read an article about the project that was selected for the Business Model Promotion Project. The system was in place from upstream to downstream, and it was eligible for a metropolitan subsidy, so we decided to introduce it,” he says. To operate the system, there was a proposal to compact the plastic packaging and have it collected directly by a recycling company. We invested in a baler and thanks to the volume reduction is solved the major “transporting air” issue with recycling plastic packaging.”
The first baler in the cleaning industry
Orwak Japan supplied the dual chamber baler 5070-HDC, which was installed in the Tamagawa Plant. This marked the first baler in the cleaning industry in Japan! The cross-binding feature helps maintain the compaction ratio of the plastic, a material that otherwise easily expands. The separate bale chambers facilitate sorting of different types of plastic. The bales are weighed and when a certain load is attained, a recycling company collects the bales.
Bale data shared with collection companies
This recycling of plastic packaging not only reduces CO2 emissions in waste disposal but also means that what was previously treated as industrial waste and required processing costs can now be sold as a resource.
Yoshinobu Miyagawa, CEO of Soritsu (left), and Kentaro Kawahara, GM of the Hakuyosha Tokyo Factory
Building a sustainable, recycling-oriented business
The 5070-HDC baler is highly rated for its ease of use and safety, and based on the results at the Tamagawa Plant, another unit is scheduled to be installed at another plant in Tokyo. Furthermore, going forward, the company is considering expanding the range of items recycled beyond plastic packaging to include cardboard and PET bottles, and is also considering expanding the range of items recycled for uniform rentals. There are also plans to recycle uniforms, which are discarded in large quantities when they are replaced. The CEO comments: “Our goal is to eliminate as much waste as possible from our business, and ultimately to be able to recycle everything.”
As a leading company in the cleaning industry, it was an important decision to take on the challenge of recycling plastic packaging materials and it is hoped that this initiative will spread throughout the industry in the future.
Photos shared by Orwak Japan