JAPAN - About two hours north of Tokyo by high speed shinkusen bullet train, in the Pacific coastal town of Iwaki, Fukushima prefecture, Mr Toru Abe founder of Mitsuei Detergent & Plastics Manufacturing Company walks a narrow road as an independent manufacturer among major multinationals in one of Japan’s most price sensitive markets; consumer household chemicals - detergents and bleach.
As both a brand owner, and an OEM producer of household cleaning products to major multinationals such as P&G and Unilever, Mitsuei faces daily competition on the retail shelves; “Our core business is chemical products” says Mr Abe “We began 34 years ago with Hydrogen Peroxide, household bleach, using packaging from outside suppliers.

Packaging bleach requires very high quality packaging, and particularly secure closures. Leakage and product failure resulted in several costly product liability claims. "In fact the situation got so bad that I actually considered closing the business" says Abe.
“But instead, I brought our packaging in-house and concentrated on improving quality and intensifying quality control systems”.
“Of course hydrogen peroxide is a very a difficult chemical to package” he adds “There will always be some incidences of leakage in transit. It is an issue which all companies in the household cleaning product have to put up with!”
PET can’t be used for bleach so those lines generally require HDPE, however, encouraged by Japan’s Package Recycling Law, he uses an LLDP / HDPE mix to achieve a 20-30 percent reduction in weight.
Under the Law, manufacturers pay a weight-based fee, so using the LLDP/HDPE combination gives Mitsuei up to 30 percent cost advantage on the Fee, although per unit the actual amount isn’t great.
In addition, by introducing the slightly cheaper LLDP, Mitsuei enjoys a base saving of approximately 20 percent on material cost the ever increasing oil prices.
The most costly consideration is the sturdy closure and at Mitsuei bleach container closures are individually attached by hand “It’s the most common defect area which is most prone to leakage, so we are especially attentive to this area of the package”.
Journey to the East
In 2001 Mr Abe took the unusual step, for a small-scale privately owned Japanese company, when he took Mitsuei into a three-partner Joint Venture chemical operation in VietNam one of his partners is the trading company of Yamaha (the motorcycle manufacturer) while the other is a Vietnamese-Japanese private investor.
The factory, in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, began production in 2004, and currently more than 40 percent of production remains in country being OEMd to multinationals like the VietNam operations of P&G and Unilever. The remainder is exported as filled product to Japan.
In addition a subsidiary plastic company in VietNam manufactures caps and closures for direct export to Mitsui’s Iwaki plant.