Environmental Strategy of Japanese Digital Printing Industry

Abstract

Japan has little domestic energy resources and relies on overseas energy resources for the bulk of its needs. The energy consumption of Japan in 2000 became approximately nine times larger than in 1955, just after the end of the Second World War. Expectations for the role of energy conservation are increasing, due to the exacerbation of global environmental problems. These suggest that we need not only the reduction of electricity consumption but also the reduction of environmentally-unfriendly materials and the adoption of product recycling.Some consider environmental conservation to be a burden on the economy. For a corporation, in order to sustain effective environmental conservation activities, the activities themselves must be part of a system that yields profits and enhances the corporate structure. In business processes, environmental conservation activities and profit yielding activities must be oriented in the same direction, and for this reason, these can be achieved at the same time by sharpening our ingenuity. We defined our environmental management as a “management that conserves the environment while creating economic value”. By setting a high level of environmental target, and accelerating process innovation and development of environmental technologies for products, the environmental loads and costs will be reduced by saving energy and resources while enhancing the product competitiveness.I will show an environmental management system and some typical environmental technologies developed in the Japanese digital printing industry.