Product Design By Design: Environmental Friendliness Is Built-In.

Through development of Eco-PET easy-to-recycle PET bottles The biggest problems in recycling are making the recycling process as efficient as possible, lowering costs, and lowering recycled products' prices. To tackle one of these still serious problems by making recycling more efficient, TaKaRa developed the Eco-PET bottle, the first in the brewing and distilling industry to make radical changes based on "Independent Design Guidelines for Type II PET Bottle Recycling." The Eco-PET bottle's label is easy to remove, the bottle has no handle or parts made of any another material, and the cap, too, is made of the same plastic material to boost recycling efficiency. We've even reduced the amount of plastic used in the bottle itself. We tackled the task of facilitating honmirin bottle recycling by making the paper label easier to remove, among other improvements.

Through system development efforts to reduce generation of used commercial containers from restaurants and bars We are working on commercializing more refillable bottles that can be reused when empty for restaurants and other large volume commercial establishments where large quantities of empties are generated in a very short space of time. We ship our genuine shochu "Yokaichi" to restaurants and distributors in 5-liter back-in-box packs and provide individual customer flagons called " tokkuri" with the restaurant's name on them; the eating establishment fills the washable and reusable tokkuri with shochu, bringing the number of disposable empties down to zero. We are also trying to organize the voluntary collection of other small empties after their use at restaurants and bars.�B

Through attempts to "sell to measure" and rethink packaging altogether At the root of the problem of packaging wastes lie human attempts to save time and trouble by inventing a growing variety of new containers and packages. We could call this the history of labor productivity enhancement at the cost of resource productivity. But in the process of radically rethinking packaging at TaKaRa, we decided to promote sale of shochu by volume, straight out of the tap, locally; in other words, we've gone back to the ancient roots of the brewing and distilling business. Customers bring their own receptacles, and the supplier measures out as much as they ask for: this brings containers and packaging waste down to zero, a simple solution and a far cry from the throw-away consumer society we live in today.