News Releases 2021

Oct. 29, 2021

Industry-academia Working Group Launched to Build Sustainable Textile Industry Ecosystem

JGC Holdings Corporation (Representative Director, Chairman and CEO Masayuki Sato) announced that it has partnered with Teijin Ltd. (Representative Director and President Jun Suzuki) and University of Tokyo (President Teruo Fujii) to launch and commence operating an industry-academia working group (hereinafter "the WG") in order to shed light on the challenges to building a sustainable textile industry ecosystem, coordinate with stakeholders toward overcoming those challenges, and furthermore to undertake discussions on revising waste disposal methods and establishing individual recycling methods that leverage the vitality of the private sector to promote recycling.

Recently, environmental devastation in the form of marine contamination and global warming arising from greenhouse gases has grown serious, and measures to combat it are being hurriedly pursued worldwide. The textile industry's environmental burden is receiving close attention also, including problems such as the mass disposal of apparel and carbon dioxide emissions in the manufacturing processes, which is creating an urgent need to address the industry's sustainability issues.

The WG was founded by JGC Holdings, Teijin and University of Tokyo in August 2021 in order to gather together a wide range of opinions from the textile industry. A total of seven companies and organizations, including companies that make up the supply chain, experts and NPOs, are participating. The results of the WG's deliberations are scheduled to be consolidated in January 2022 as recommendations to the government.

As one of the world's leading engineering companies, JGC Group has a rich track record inside and outside Japan in a variety of fields such as oil and gas and infrastructure, and recently the Group has also been focusing on the commercialization of environmental technologies.

Teijin operates a large-scale plant that utilizes polyester chemical recycling technology with textile products as the raw material, and has led the world in commercializing a chemical recycling technology for producing polyester fiber from discarded textile products. It is developing its business globally.

University of Tokyo (Hirao Laboratory, School of Engineering) possesses comprehensive expertise that ranges from evaluating the social value of recycling systems through life cycle assessment (LCA)* and extracting the challenges to realizing them, through to designing social systems.

Through this WG's activities, the Group's technological strengths and expertise, which it has cultivated through its engineering business, along with the textile recycling expertise that Teijin possesses and the knowledge of recycling system value evaluation possessed by University of Tokyo's Hirao Laboratory, will be utilized to promote initiatives for building a sustainable textile industry ecosystem in partnership with the participating members.

  • *Life cycle assessment (LCA): A method for quantitatively calculating the environmental burden in the sequence of a life cycle, from the procurement of raw materials for products and services through to their production, distribution, disposal and recycling.