From Kyodo News International
TOKYO — GE Plastics Co., a group company of General Electric Co. of the United States, said Thursday it has developed two new environmentally friendly resins that can be used for automotive parts such as energy absorbers and body panels.
The resins — Valox iQ and Xenoy iQ — have been developed as part of GE’s initiative called “ecomagination,” which is aimed at building innovative solutions that are ecologically sound, the company said in a press conference in Tokyo.
“Ecomagination” derives from a combination of the words ecology and imagination. The new resins will help global automotive manufacturers address critical environmental concerns of conserving energy, lowering greenhouse gas emissions and reducing post-consumer waste, according to GE Plastics.
The resins are created with polymers based on polybutylene terephthalate, or PBT, that are derived from post-consumer plastic waste, GE Plastics said, adding they consume less energy and yield less carbon dioxide in their manufacturing process compared with traditional resins.
More specifically, CO2 emissions are reduced by at least 1.7 kilograms per 1 kg of resin, saving up to 8.5 barrels of crude oil per 1,000 kg of resin, the company said. GE Plastics said that if all PBT was replaced in 2005 with the new resins, it would have put to use more than 562,000 metric tons per year of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) waste, equivalent to 22.5 billion PET bottles.
The new resins are currently available for sampling, and commercial quantities will be available starting in the fourth quarter of this year, GE Plastics said.
Gregory Adams, vice president and general manager of GE Plastics’ automotive business, said at the press conference that the development of the latest technology enables scrap from a PET bottle to be used for 15 years as an auto part.
House of Councillors member Masaharu Nakagawa, secretary of the Global Legislators Organization for a Balanced Environment, Japan, attended the press conference as a guest speaker and touched on the issue of consumer consciousness, saying, “In order to overcome environmental problems and create a sustainable society, innovation in environmental technology must be coupled with raising the awareness of consumers.”
As part of the ecomagination initiative, GE said it plans to more than double its research investment in environmentally responsible technologies from $700 million in 2004 to $1.5 billion in 2010.
The initiative also targets reducing the company’s own greenhouse gas emissions by 1 percent by 2012 and cutting the concentration of its greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 30 percent by 2008, it said.
GE Plastics said it made the announcement in Tokyo because the Japanese market is a key driver of the global automotive industry.
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