About 10 years ago, Yasushi Takakura, who ran a metal recycling company, watched a TV program that showed decommissioned airplanes lined up on land in a U.S. desert called an “aircraft boneyard.”

“What a waste!” Takakura, 68, president of Toyotomi Sangyo Co. in Namerikawa, Toyama Prefecture, said he thought at the time. “Our company would be able to dismantle and recycle them more properly. Couldn’t we do that on our own?”

Air carriers are being called on to abide by the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. A market has been established in Western nations for businesses that dismantle and recycle airplanes, but there were none in Japan.

“The only available choice (for airlines in Japan and the rest of Asia) has been to take their decommissioned aircraft to Western countries,” Takakura said. “But they would certainly prefer to bring them to a recycler that is available nearby.”

Last year, two Boeing 777 aircraft decommissioned by Japan Airlines Co. were dismantled in a JAL hangar at Haneda Airport in Tokyo. 

Officials said that was the first attempt made in Japan to dismantle passenger airplanes for the complete recycling of their components and parts. 

The work was undertaken by Toyotomi Sangyo, which is hoping to develop serious business operations in the field of aircraft recycling.

The first of the Boeing 777s, which measured 74 meters long and 65 meters wide and weighed 155 tons, was taken apart last May.

A passenger aircraft of the model is made up of about 3 million components, including its engines. A hard and strong aluminum alloy called “extra super duralumin” (ESD), also known as 7075, is used in its wings and its main body.

It took about a month and a half to dismantle the first of the planes under conditions of “strict secrecy.” The news was released to the public only in November ahead of the start of the disassembly of the second aircraft.

It was also announced that Toyotomi Sangyo was undertaking the work. The company ended working on the second plane in late December.

FIRST OPPORTUNITY IN A DECADE

JAL removed some of the components of the aircraft, such as electronic devices, radar equipment and engines, to sell as used parts.

The airline assigned some of the other parts for sale on the general market. They include wall cutouts with a window, as well as life vests upcycled into pouches, sacoche shoulder bags and other products.

Toyotomi Sangyo, in the meantime, took apart the airframe containing both metals and plastics. Waste from the dismantlement process was carried by trucks to a Toyotomi Sangyo Group company site in Toyama Prefecture, where it was carefully separated into metals, plastics and other components.

Plastics, used massively in the passenger cabin and elsewhere, accounted for about 20 percent of all the waste. This was burned in an incineration plant, which uses heat to generate power, and the residual ash was incinerated at high temperatures for reuse as molten slag aggregate.

The nominal recycling rate stood at 96 percent. The remaining 4 percent of the waste is always lost, at any rate, during the work process, including by being drawn into a dust collector while the airframe is being cut, the officials said.

TAKING THE PLUNGE

When Toyotomi Sangyo looked to get into the aircraft recycling business, Takakura worked with his father, Yoshiaki, 88, the Toyotomi Sangyo Group chairman, to gather information and study the matter. He also visited the United States on an inspection tour.

Toyotomi Sangyo in 2014 joined the Aircraft Fleet Recycling Association, an industry group based in the United States, to become its only corporate member from Japan.

The company holds patents on equipment for taking apart an entire train. It has also obtained additional patents in Japan, the United States, China and Europe on equipment and methods for dismantling an airplane.

The company was seeking opportunities to enter the aircraft market when it won the commission from JAL, Takakura said.

JAL employees worked in a building next to the hangar where the airplanes were demolished. To reduce noise levels, Toyotomi Sangyo workers used powered cutters with noise reduction features to cut the airframe manually instead of relying on large, heavy machinery to do the work.

The tail fin was the first component to be taken down. The successive cutouts from the aircraft were lifted to the ground with a crane. Heavy machinery was used to make them small enough to be loaded onto trucks for transport to Toyama Prefecture.

Those materials were thereafter carefully separated for recycling.

The ESD retrieved from the first aircraft was sold to another company for use as raw material for extracting aluminum. Toyotomi Sangyo, however, is hoping to process the ESD from the second airplane into ingots so it can sell them on its own.

“Toyotomi Sangyo, which previously worked on a Self-Defense Forces aircraft, has indeed disassembled the first of our airplanes safely and has achieved recycling on an advanced level,” a JAL public relations official said approvingly.

Takakura said his company is hoping in the future to team with a major trading house to venture into the market of decommissioned airplanes across the whole of Asia, where aviation demand is expected to grow further.

While the latest work was done in a hangar, Takakura said his company is hoping to build a demolition yard next to a provincial airport in Japan and is studying candidate sites offering optimal conditions.

Dismantling work sites were previously called dirty, dangerous and demanding. Demolition and recycling businesses, however, are making efforts not to be shunned by young potential workers, including by allowing work to be done indoors and introducing electric heavy machinery and automatic separation equipment.

Takakura said he is mulling various uses for the ESD to be retrieved from recycling processes.

“I would propose, for example, metal baseball bats,” he said. “We could promote them as bats that can launch baseballs into the sky.”