Eco-balance in business activities

It has long been said that in order for any business enterprise to survive through the 21st century, it is an essential prerequisite to improve its environmental performance. At manufacturing companies, in particular, they are continually stepping up activities to control the environmental pollution caused by their products and production plants. By the way, aren´t there any companies that implement pollution control simply because there is growing social concern about the environment or because other companies are doing the same? Aren´t there any companies that consider only the life cycle of each individual product? Actually, many (if not all) manufacturing companies make a wide variety of products. Therefore, without evaluating the life cycle of products as a group, it would be impossible for any manufacturing company to determine the priority of environmental measures to take in its business activity. Recently, we, at Ricoh, made an attempt to clarify which of all the company´s activities give the larger impacts on the environment by employing a new technique to make a comprehensive analysis. Namely, we first divided the company´s activities largely into seven stages - procurement, production, distribution, selling, use, recycling, and scrapping. Next, we collected data about the load on the environment produced in each of the stages (air and water pollution, energy consumption, waste, etc.). Then, we assessed the overall load our business imposes on the environment employing one of the proven techniques that are used around the world and a new technique that is being developed in Japan. As a result, we could find that in addition to the environmental measures we have taken so far, there are new problems to tackle in earnest in the future. We could also find that the new analytical technique is an effective decision-making tool for setting goals of environmental conservation