Providing Environmentally Conscious Products and Services
About Environmentally Conscious Products and Services
Since FY2016, the Hitachi High-Tech Group has been promoting the simultaneous implementation of eco-design (Hitachi's environmentally conscious design assessment) and life cycle assessment (LCA) for newly developed products that involve design activities. With these two assessments, we are working to standardize parts, extend service life, utilize recycled materials, and design in a way that facilitates recycling, thereby reducing waste.
Eco-design identifies a total of 30 environmental impact items that affect climate change, resource depletion, and ecosystem degradation at each stage of the life cycle of products and services, and evaluates the reduction of environmental impact from business activities from multiple perspectives in order to make improvements. Specifically, our aim is to realize a decarbonized society, and we have been working on reducing CO2 emissions during product usage, which makes up a relatively large proportion of CO2 emissions in the value chain (Scope 3). Under this initiative, we are adopting design and development processes based on the international standard IEC 62430.* This contributes to enhanced competitiveness and added value for products by helping to reduce their environmental impact. Permeating development processes with this approach is heightening awareness of the environment among engineers and other people concerned.
In Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), we quantitatively evaluate the major factors of global environmental impacts such as metal and plastic consumption, water consumption, climate change, and air pollution for newly developed products, and use the results to disclose information to stakeholders and to improve the design of next-generation products.
We also offer products that comply with various environmental regulations such as WEEE and RoHS.
We will continue to strive to reduce our own environmental impact and develop environmentally conscious products to provide our customers with products with even lower environmental impact.
The Hitachi High-Tech Group has a wide range of environmentally conscious devices and products and offers a variety of solutions. By providing these kinds of business and services that contribute to the environment, we are committed first of all to providing our customers with solutions for their issues as well as to continuing our contribution to the realization of a decarbonized society based on the reduction of CO2 emissions, the realization of a recycling-oriented society based on the effective use of water and other resources, and the realization of a society in harmony with nature by curbing the discharge of chemical substances.
* A standard set forth by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) for environmentally conscious design of electrical and electronic products.
