Environmental Report 2011

Significance of the Environmental Report

Significance of the 2011 Environmental Report

As part of its commitment to fighting climate change, Japan launched the Challenge 25 Campaign in January of last year in an effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is a key issue worldwide, and with COP16 held in December last year in Cancun, even greater efforts are required. Regulations on chemical substances are also being strengthened, with SVHC additions taking place twice a year under REACH. Further, the understanding and management of newly designated chemical substances has been strengthened within Japan by the implementation of revised government decrees under PRTR laws. 

Masato Shimamura
Executive Vice President,
Environmental Management,
JAE Group

I would like to take this opportunity to reflect on the environmental activities that we have been pursuing under such circumstances. In FY 2010, we focused on addressing climate change, and also set a variety of targets in areas such as reducing use of raw materials and chemical substances, and promoting green procurement, and have been working hard to achieve them. Specifically, we switched over to production systems with more efficient energy and raw materials usage and exhaustively practiced Cool Biz and Warm Biz measures, while at the same time promoting and deploying our Ten-Point Plan for Saving Energy as part of our energy-saving activities, which now engage employees to save energy at home as well. To report on the results of our efforts, the impact of the stubbornly strong yen and 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami caused us to fall short of our goal for the reduction of average CO2 emissions per unit of real sales, but we were able to attain all of our other targets.
With the challenging business environment that is expected to continue in FY 2011 and the energy-saving target for this summer that has been pegged at a 15% cut over the previous year, it our social duty both to grow our business and save energy. To that end, we will focus our efforts on increasing our energy-saving and resource-conservation measures, teaching environmental awareness, and promoting environmental management activities.
This online environmental report summarizes our FY 2010 environmental activities. Nothing would please me more than to hear your opinions on how we could make further improvements to our environmental activities.