• Cradle to Cradle Certified® products (GROHE brand)

Four products have been certified Gold for satisfying the five Cradle to Cradle international criteria: material health, material reutilization, renewable energy & carbon management, water stewardship, and social fairness. With waste recycling rates of 99% and a use of brass with recycling proportions of up to 80%, LIXIL’s GROHE brand has incrementally approached a circular economy for years.

GROHE’s Cradle to Cradle Certified® products (A new page will open) >

• Resin window EW (TOSTEM)

It achieves world-leading thermal insulation by using resin materials, which don’t conduct much heat, separating the space in the resin frame to create a multilayered hollow structure that suppresses heat transfer, and using high-performance triple-glazed glass. With its design that uses more recycled content than conventional products, the percentage of recycled materials, including resin scraps generated in the manufacturing process, in this sliding window product^* has increased by roughly three times. In addition to the frame itself, we also use recyclable resin for the surface layer of the frame.

* In case of the S range.

• revia, a circular material

Plastic is a familiar material in our daily lives. Largely comprised of single use, plastic waste has more than doubled globally over the last twenty years. Yet only 9% is recycled, and most plastic waste is incinerated^*1 or become landfill.

To promote the effective reuse^*2 of plastics, LIXIL has developed a circular material that can be made from most household and commercial plastic waste including the composite types or even marine plastics called revia.

Bringing New Value to Plastics, this material combines plastic and wood waste that would have otherwise been incinerated after use that can result in 82% reduction in CO₂ emissions. The material itself can also be recycled^*3 – collected to become revia products again.

In Jan 2023, LIXIL will launch “revia pave,” a paving material for sale in Japan.^*4 LIXIL will expand its product offering with series of various applications, and aim to collaborate with like- minded local governments to build an ecosystem that spans procurement, production, sale, and installation to accelerate the circular use of resources.

*1 Includes thermal recovery

*2 to be reused and sold as a new product or as part of

*3 does not guarantee infinite recycling

*4 limited to Japan’s main island

revia (Japanese only / A new page will open) >

• Replaceable spout with built-in water purifier

Some LIXIL kitchen faucets are designed so that just the spout portion can be replaced with one that has a built-in water purifier. This helps reduce waste when the faucet reaches end-of-life.

Upgradable products (Japanese only / A new page will open) >

• withCUBE mobile bathroom booth

It does not require any large-scale construction, so it can be installed in as a little as one day^* and easily withdrawn, thus making it easier to provide toilet facilities at distribution centers and other locations. It can help reduce the amount of resources and energy used and the amount of waste generated across a product life cycle by providing toilet spaces that can be easily installed in and removed from various different locations through rental and lease agreements.

* Preparatory construction to install water and wastewater lines and electrical wiring may be required separately.

withCUBE (Japanese only / A new page will open) >

At LIXIL International water faucet factories, we carry out alloy smelting in in-house furnaces. Up to 80% of the brass we use in these plants for the GROHE brand is recycled material collected in and outside the factories. LIXIL factories in Japan are reducing the energy required to produce new ingots and other aluminum products by reusing aluminum scraps from outside their manufacturing process; this reduces CO₂ emissions by approximately 640,000 tons per year.

With regard to plastic resources, we aim to recycle materials from one resin window into another. We are also promoting the effective use and recycling of resin materials by, for instance, building systems to recycle materials left over from factory processes and introducing equipment to sort and separate the materials. Our Tono Plant in Gifu, another site in Japan, successfully reduced waste from adjustment tiles used for creating wall construction materials by 55 tons a year and reduced the raw materials used by 80% by improving operations and eliminating the cutting process.

At our factories in Rayong and Rangsit, Thailand, we have been recycling waste materials that were previously sent to landfill, such as sludge, mold, and ceramic scraps, into ingredients for making concrete. This has reduced the amount of landfill waste generated by the two factories by approximately 22,700 tons (98.2% compared to FYE2019) and boosted recycling rates to 98.0% in FYE2022. In addition, our two ceramic factories in Mexico have managed to recycle ceramic waste and gypsum molds previously earmarked for landfill.

Having obtained certification as a biomass business operator and lobbied timber suppliers to join forest certification organizations, our Nabari Plant in Mie, Japan, succeeded in selling its previously discarded wood shavings as biomass fuel and reducing its wood shavings waste to zero in April 2020.

In FYE2022, TOSTEM THAI acquired Level 5, the highest level in the Green Industry commendation system operated by Thailand’s Ministry of Industry. In addition to pursuing initiatives within the organization, our efforts to support the activities of business partners and suppliers and to extend our environment-conscious network across the supply chain earned high praise. We worked with 170 major suppliers to promote environmental activities that took into account the degree of environmental footprint. We also helped 14 companies that exert especially large implications on the environment implement improvements which earned them a Level 2 certification.