Maspro Denkoh, a Japanese antenna and radio equipment manufacturer with an IoT line covering RFID and LPWA, published a case study on 14 October 2026 setting out an RFID system it has supplied to Hyper Cycle Systems Co., Ltd., a resource recycler in Chiba Prefecture, Japan. The system has one job: stop a lithium-ion battery from a cordless power tool from being fed into a shredder.
Hyper Cycle Systems dismantles drum-type and fully automatic washing machines by hand, using tools such as electric screwdrivers, and the stripped parts are then crushed whole in a large shredder. As Maspro describes the problem, if a worker mis-feeds a power tool’s lithium-ion battery along with the parts and forgets to retrieve it, the battery reaches the crusher at the next stage and risks a fire inside the machine. Maspro’s answer is a planar RFID antenna in front of the shredder infeed. It detects the tag, an alarm sounds and the belt conveyor stops; once the tag has been retrieved, a reset button to hand silences the alarm and lets the conveyor restart.
The recycler began operations in April 1999 to comply with the enactment of Japan’s Home Appliance Recycling Law. Mitsubishi Electric, which describes the business on its own plastic recycling pages, calls it the foundry of a new, sustainable recycling industry, turning metal and plastic reclaimed from old appliances into industrial-grade materials.
RFID as a safety interlock, not as inventory
This is a different proposition from the way most UHF RFID is sold. Nothing is being counted and there is no item master. The tag sits on the tool battery, not on the material being processed, and the system’s whole purpose is to notice a tag somewhere it should not be. A read event is the exception, not the data: on a clean shift the reader reads nothing at all. That is mistake-proofing, like the RFID interlock used to prevent errors during fuel discharge, where the value is in the one read that halts a process, not the thousands that build a record.
Three Maspro parts do it. The RAF2031 is a right-hand circularly polarised planar antenna covering 902 to 928 MHz, typical gain 8.5 dBi, half-power beamwidth about 62 degrees in both planes, rated IP65 and IP67 and good from -40 to +70 C for a dusty crushing hall. Maspro’s reason for circular polarisation, at an axial ratio of 2 dB or less, is that the small ratio between the polarisation axes keeps read performance uniform across varied tag orientations, which is the point when a battery can arrive at any angle on a conveyor. The linear RAF2031L is for when tag polarisation can be matched.
The RWHL2006 reader/writer is the licensed station variant of a six-port unit, output 1 W or less at 10 to 30 dBm. Its 6 GPIO inputs and 6 outputs are what make the interlock work without a controller, and Maspro’s product page gives sensor input and alarm device output as the purpose. It takes DC 24 V or PoE and is rated only IP52, so the antenna is the weatherproofed half of the pair. Paid activation of its embedded MASPRO RFID Reader Connect licence enables the PC-free operation, and a RAGK2 bracket sets elevation from 20 degrees up to 45 degrees down.
Why a crushing line is the right place to do this
The hazard is documented and heavily concentrated. Provisional Japanese government figures for fiscal 2025, covering April 2025 to March 2026 and reported in July 2026, recorded 36,760 incidents of fire, smoke or sparks in waste processing suspected to have been caused by lithium-ion batteries, including 8,935 actual fires. Of those, 32,167, or 87.5%, occurred at recycling facilities carrying out crushing, sorting or compaction, exactly the kind of operation Hyper Cycle Systems runs. The Tokyo Fire Department separately recorded a record 382 lithium-ion battery fires in 2025, 143 of them while the batteries were not charging or on standby; the datasets count different things and cannot be added together. Both are taken from Kei Communication Technology’s survey, Record Lithium-Ion Battery Incidents: Tightening Regulation, Ownership Risk and Japan’s Recycling Gap.
The same survey sets out Japan’s Ministry of the Environment comprehensive lithium-ion battery measures package, which for treatment facilities lists X-ray and AI sorting, fire detection, automatic shutdown, water suppression and alarms, and for collection and transport lists preventing entry into crushing processes. The Maspro installation is a direct and inexpensive instance of two of those controls at once: it detects, and it stops the conveyor, at the point of entry to the crushing process. Against X-ray or AI sorting it is a much smaller capital item, limited to batteries somebody has tagged.
What Maspro does not publish is any evidence of the outcome. The case study gives no count of batteries tagged, no results, no incidents prevented and no named staff, and it describes a single shredder line. Whether every battery in the tool pool carries a tag is not stated either. The engineering is legible and the parts are off-the-shelf UHF hardware, but the performance data is absent. More in this sector: our waste management coverage, Senec’s RFID-locked waste containers and the environmental cost of RFID tags themselves.
Read more at https://miesugi.maspro.co.jp/iot/about_case_study_rfid_hcs/
