The company’s announcement follows the accreditation of the Australia and New Zealand Recycling Platform (ANZRP), a group supported by many leading global technology brands including Panasonic, as an approved recycler for the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme.

The Scheme is due to come into effect in July 2012 and aims to increase recycling rates of televisions and computers to more than 80 per cent by 2020-21.

Panasonic hopes its involvement in the program will help the company create products that use more recoverable raw materials or which are easier to process during recycling process.

Steve Rust, Managing Director, Panasonic Australia said his company’s global design and engineering hoped to learn much from the local initiative.

“The Australian initiative will be one of the largest in the world and Panasonic hopes to use information from the local program to develop better and greener products,” Mr Rust said.

“One of the advantages of involving manufacturers like Panasonic in the Australian recycling program is that we can use our knowledge and experiences to further minimise future product waste.”

Panasonic is already using information from other programs from around the world to improve its products. For example, recycling experiences with televisions helped significantly reduce the amount of components in CRT TVs. This allowed later models to be more precisely recycled than older models.

Observation of recycling facilities in Japan also assisted Panasonic in designing a range of new recycling technologies – such as a high precision plastics sorter that dramatically improved processing times within recycling facilities.

“There is absolutely no reason that similar innovation can’t come from the work that is being done here in Australia,” Mr Rust said.

“In the not too distant future we could see yesterday’s Australian e-waste pave the way for many future technology directions.”

ANZRP will begin its recycling activities in the coming months. The group will be assisting waste management companies and councils to address the essential site-specific safety and environmental issues when handling television and computer waste.