HOYA has made a significant step in achieving its environmental goals. Its leaders say it was a relatively easy foot forward and they believe others in the industry should follow them on that path.
Mr Craig Chick, managing director of HOYA Vision Care Australia & New Zealand, is issuing a challenge to his industry colleagues and competitors.
Since February 2025, his company has been sending its swarf – the material left over after lenses are cut and ground down to fit into frames – to Opticycle’s Sydney recycling facility, as part of its plan to meet its sustainability and environmental goals.
HOYA is the first specialised lens supplier in ANZ to send its offcuts and swarf directly from the manufacturing process, as part of the program.
At the time of writing, that material made up 500kg of the 48 tons of total optic waste collected by recycling company Opticycle over the past 12 months diverted from landfill and turned into new products.
And both HOYA and Opticycle are keen to see even more kept out of landfill.
Which is why Chick has thrown down the gauntlet to others.
“I would challenge my competitors to replicate what we are doing, because I think it’s something that we can all benefit from,” he says.
“The more we can all do as an industry, the better.”
Chick is pretty proud that his company is the first lens supplier to take that step.
He believes it is one of a number of HOYA affiliates to participate in such a program globally.
“HOYA, at a global level, are very interested in what we are doing,” he says.
“They are very supportive of this project, and I think if we can continue to work with Opticycle, they would be looking at other opportunities to implement similar programs in other markets.”
One thing he appreciates is how easy it has been to take this more sustainable route.
In the past, offcuts and swarf from HOYA’s Sydney lab were put into plastic bags and carted off to the landfill.
Under the arrangement with Opticyle, the material is now put into HOYA’s own recyclable packaging and simply takes another turn, across town to a recycling facility where it is reproduced into material for pavers and bench tops.
“The reality is that it’s got to be easy in the process and the business doesn’t incur large costs,” says Chick.
“From that perspective, it was easy, we didn’t need to change a large amount of our processes.
“The cost was very sustainable. It was an easy, practical outcome.”
But an important one for the planet too, and in helping the company to meet its own environmental goals, in Australia and around the world.
“There’s a lot of waste that goes into the production of lenses. Even though we don’t produce lenses or grind them locally, we do a lot of fitting and mounting in the final part of the production process, particularly here in our Sydney laboratory,” Chick says.
“So cutting that lens down from a 70-millimetre blank to the size of the frame, there’s a large amount of waste that results from that process.”
Beyond meeting his own and his company’s sustainability KPIs, Chick believes initiatives like this are vital to helping the industry stay ahead of the curve of regulation, mandated change and shifts in customer expectations.
“There is an expectation from not only our customers, but from the end user, that the lenses and their eyewear are produced in a sustainable way.
For HOYA, at a global level, this is something they take very seriously,” says Chick, who is also the chair of the Optical Distributors and Manufacturers Association (ODMA).
“And we have to be very careful, as a profession and as an industry, because we’re probably one of the few industries that, particularly with lenses, deals only in plastic.
“So there’s an expectation, even at a government level, that what are we doing as an industry needs to be sustainable and we are being responsible with our waste.
“We want to be in a situation where we are effectively making this change on our own, based on our own decision-making, rather than being forced into something which may come at some stage,” he says.
“If we can be ahead of the curve, we can be sustainable, then we can manage that outcome.”
Looking to expand the initiative
HOYA has plans to grow that outcome, in the next stage of its partnership with Opticycle.
“Phase one is working with the waste that we produce during the manufacturing process of the lenses,” says Chick.
“Phase two we are exploring with ways to encourage our retail partners having collection depots
“So for example, someone’s just bought new eyewear. What do they do with the old ones? Opticycle take that, they take the frames, they take the metal, and they separate the metal and the plastic from that.”
That will be music to the ears of Opticycle co-founder Mr Michael Klapsogiannis, whose company has its own goals for expanding its reach and collection points around Australia.
Like Chick and his colleagues at HOYA, Klapsogiannis is keen to grow awareness of Opticycle and how it can support the optical industry to be more sustainable.
He says the company has a network of about 600 collection depots around Australia.
“That’s where people can drop off glasses and contact lenses,” he says.
“We really want to get that to about 1,000 depots, and once we hit that we think that will be good coverage and we can switch our focus back onto the back-end process.”
Klapsogiannis believes Opticycle has that reasonably sorted.
In the case of HOYA’s swarf and lens offcuts, the recycler has developed a process that creates a material used in pavers and bench tops.
Some of those pavers are sold through another company associated with Opticycle, with the rest of the material provided to other firms who use it to produce larger, commercial pavers and also bench tops, some of which have been used in the fit-outs of ophthalmic businesses.
Recycled optical material makes up close to a third of Opticycle’s pavers.
“We’ve developed a product where that recycled material is mixed with our plastics, and it basically replaces sand, because we would normally use sand to create that rough, non-slip surface on the paver, because this material also doesn’t melt.”
As well as new collection depots, the company is working to develop new products.
“We are looking for other solutions for the material,” says Klapsogiannis. “There’s a couple of other companies we’re speaking to regarding the swarf material.”
He believes Opticycle could comfortably double the amount of recycled optical material it currently receives.
Which is why HOYA’s relationship as the first lens supplier is so significant.
And also Chick’s challenge to the sector.
For the industry and the environment.
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