Sep 13 2006
On August 28, Fuji Xerox inaugurated use of a returnable container to distribute spare parts to 500 service locations in Japan as well as a container recovery system, which the company has jointly developed with Starway Co., Ltd.
Fuji Xerox had been using cardboard containers when delivering new spare parts and recovering used ones, and these containers could only be used for the roundtrip. The new container, based on Starway’s E-Star Pack® (ESP) and customized for transporting Fuji Xerox’s spare parts, is durable enough to be used more than 100 times, reducing the total amount of new packaging materials by 1,294 tons (74 percent of the present level) and container purchasing costs by 55 percent by 2010Note. Also, carbon dioxide as well as nitrogen oxide emissions can be reduced by 658 tons and 0.82 tons respectively by 2010, in the process of producing and recycling of the materials, thus reducing environmental impact in the logistics area.
The newly co-developed containers have incorporated the following points in addition to the ESP’s original features:
- Can be neatly folded so that nine of them fit into one packNote, enabling sets of ten to be recovered together, reducing the cost of recovering empty containers to one-tenth
- By making the material thinner while maintaining durability, the overall weight of the container has been reduced from more than 5kg to 3.1kg.
- A new traceability system utilizing RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), “ESP-take II” developed by Starway, enables an increased container turnover rate and manages contents’ availability as well as recovery on the Web.
Quick and accurate recovery of empty containers at minimum cost is the key to keeping returnable logistics systems profitable, and the new container and its recovering system has overcome such challenges.