Southeast Asia’s first food grade PET bottle manufacturer to bottle recycler, also focuses on raising local awareness

Focusing on the recycling of PET bottles with the aim to be a planet- and people-friendly company

“Plastic is a very eco-friendly material if it is properly reused,” says NAKATA Hiroyuki, Chairman of HIROYUKI Co., Ltd. Paper products have come to be widely used in recent years as substitutes for plastic products.

However, he questions this, “A lot of trees are cut down to make paper, and in the end, paper is incinerated as trash without being recycled. Is that really good for the environment?”

With a production base in Malaysia, HIROYUKI manufactures and markets packaging materials and plastic resins both domestically and abroad. Under its corporate philosophy of “Always providing products that take the global environment and costs into consideration,” the company is the first in Southeast Asia to manufacture food grade—safe enough for packaging foodstuffs—recycled PET (polyethylene terephthalate) resin from used plastic bottles alone.

A Myanmar native who became a naturalized Japanese citizen started a business in Malaysia

HIROYUKI took a unique path to where it is now. The current chairman, NAKATA Hiroyuki, was born in Myanmar. When his university was shut down in the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement, he came to study in Japan in 1991. Acquiring Japanese citizenship after graduating, he began working at a company that handled packaging materials. During his work there, he became aware that packaging materials of the quality found in Japan were not manufactured in Southeast Asia. And so local subsidiaries of Japanese companies were importing them from Japan.

“There is demand for products made locally if we can provide the same quality as Japan,” he thought. With that in mind, in 2001, NAKATA himself established Hiroyuki Industries in Malaysia, where it was easy to procure the raw materials required.

From the start, the company has focused on the development of products with a low environmental impact. For cast stretch film, a packaging wrap used to secure materials and packages, the company reduced the thickness of the wrap’s paper core to around one-tenth that of conventional products, resulting in reduced use of paper. This revolutionary product was the first of its kind in Southeast Asia.

Sales, including exports to Japan, were growing steadily when the company was approached by a business partner, a Japanese packaging materials company, which was interested in being acquired. NAKATA became president, and later chairman, of this company and made the Malaysian operations, Hiroyuki Industries, its production base. Aiming for further expansion, the company name was changed to HIROYUKI in 2009, followed in 2012 by the establishment of local subsidiaries in Myanmar and Vietnam, and sales offices in Vietnam and Thailand.

In 2018, a facility was built in Malaysia to collect post-consumer PET bottles and produce food grade recycled PET resin from them. Used bottles were thus able to be recycled into materials for new PET bottles.

The first business of its kind in Southeast Asia, it was also boosted by the fact that China restricted imports of waste plastic in the previous year and was no longer accepting recyclable waste from overseas. HIROYUKI also utilizes recycled bottles to manufacture PET strapping bands for packing lumber and other materials.

Malaysia’s low recycling rates and raising awareness at elementary schools

HIROYUKI’s environmentally friendly products have a good reputation and are now widely exported to countries such as Canada and Australia, in addition to Japan and Southeast Asia.

Meanwhile, according to NAKATA, “The recycling rate of PET bottles in Malaysia is only 16 percent. Used PET bottles are still not sufficiently circulating in society.” Anticipating further growth of the recycling business in Malaysia, HIROYUKI plans to expand its production facilities for recycled PET resin. A JBIC loan will support this effort.

At the root of Malaysia’s low recycling rate is a lack of awareness. As a result, used plastic bottles are not properly collected and are often simply treated as garbage. “Firstly, I would like to teach children about the importance of recycling,” says NAKATA.

So, HIROYUKI launched “The Rescue PET Bottles School Project” recycling project at about 60 public elementary schools in the state of Johor, where its manufacturing plant for recycled PET resin is located.

Through this project, children brought as many as 500,000 used plastic bottles to school between April 2021 and November 2022. The same program has been expanded to middle schools from April 2023.

“I would be happy if in five- or ten-years’ time, they realize that they are contributing to society,” says NAKATA with a smile. His eyes are set on the future as he aspires to engage in the recycling business and to raise environmental awareness not only in Malaysia, but also in Vietnam and his home country of Myanmar.