Companies planning large waste-plastic, e-scrap, battery or waste-oil recycling plants in Japan have until noon on Friday 6 November 2026 to apply for the second call of the advanced resource-circulation investment grant. Applications opened on Tuesday 13 October through the jGrants portal, which requires a gBizID Prime account that can take two to three weeks to obtain.
Rates, and who counts as small
The grant pays one-half of eligible costs to small and medium-sized enterprises as defined by the Basic Act on SMEs, and one-third to everyone else. A small firm is treated as large if a corporation with capital of ¥500mn or more owns 100% of it, if its average taxable income over the latest three filed years exceeds ¥1.5bn, or if it is a "deemed large" company. The guidelines add that the rate actually awarded can come in below the one applied for.
A project may fall under either of two themes: supplying recycled material to industries that struggle to decarbonise, or supplying raw materials for GX products to help manufacturers stay competitive. Both cover demonstration or equipment installation.
Capacity thresholds
The plant has to be large. Waste plastics and waste oil each carry a fixed annual floor, while metals and batteries are judged on growth in volume.
| Material | Minimum level |
|---|---|
| Waste plastics | In principle 10,000 tonnes a year |
| Metals (e-scrap etc.) and batteries | Plan to roughly double processing volume in 2030 versus 2020; judged by material |
| Waste oil | 10,000 kilolitres a year |
Where the collection pool is small, such as pre-sorted material or a single product recycled back into itself, the guidelines apply a rough benchmark of 1% of the pool and judge case by case. Municipal plastics qualify for a facility that handles roughly all plastic collected in a municipality with a population of 300,000 or more or an area of 400 square kilometres or more.
Emissions conditions
Applicants must set a fiscal 2030 target for Scope 1 and 2 emissions in Japan, report progress with third-party verification each year, and publish the results. Missing the target means buying eligible credits, such as J-Credits or JCM credits, or reporting and publishing the reason. From fiscal 2026, applicants must join the GX Future League and report emissions, unless they already carry out the equivalent measures described above. GX League participants are treated as meeting the earlier conditions. Firms with fiscal 2022 CO2 emissions under 200,000 tonnes under the national reporting system, and SMEs, may submit other emissions-reduction measures instead. Applicants must also have published a quantitative circular-economy target or belong to Circular Partners or J4CE.
The announcement trap
In principle, a project is ineligible if its investment decision was announced publicly before the grant decision date. A related rule covers spending: orders, contracts and payments made before the call opened are not eligible, and an informal signal to a supplier that an order will follow counts as an order. Applicants can file a pre-start notification between the opening of the call and noon on 6 November, but the guidelines say it promises neither selection nor a grant, and a rejected applicant gets no money for work already begun.
What happens next
A review committee screens written applications and holds closed interviews that the applicant's representative must attend. Screening starts on 9 November, selected projects are due to be published in December or later, and the grant application is due within about a month of selection. The secretariat asks applicants to contact it by 23 October if possible, to check eligibility before filing. An application window is not an award, and the guidelines state no total budget for the round. Beneficiaries must keep using the equipment for at least five years after the project ends, unless the Environment Ministry recognises unavoidable circumstances, and part or all of the grant can be reclaimed if the social-implementation plan is not met.