Toshiba: Electronic Devices Business - Corporate Social Responsibilities

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CSR As a corporate citizen of planet Earth

I.Toward Achieving the Environmental Vision 2050: Efforts made in various business domains

Contribute to a Green IT Society with Advanced Semiconductor Technology, while Considering Efforts to Reduce Environmental Impacts at Factories

Toward Realizing the Environmental Vision 2050
Promoting CO₂ Emission Control in Manufacturing Processes and Energy Saving in Electronic Devices

Toshiba Group provides electronic device products supporting a broad range of industries, while pursuing performance improvement, miniaturization and power consumption reduction of semiconductors by developing advanced technologies.
Though electronic devices are vital for contemporary society, in terms of environmental impacts, during their manufacturing, they consume vast electricity required for air conditioning systems in clean rooms and manufacturing equipment. Toshiba Group's greenhouse gas emissions proportion made up by the manufacturing processes of electronic devices comprises 60% of that for the entire Group and, thus, reducing this volume of emissions is critical.
Toshiba Group is actively striving to control the increase in greenhouse gas emissions to 70% of the FY1990 level by FY2012 and subsequently achieving further 10% reduction by FY2025.
At the same time, we will promote further reduction of power consumption in electronic devices and contribute to energy conservation in various electric and electronic equipment, including IT equipment.

Case 1
Energy Saving Promotion in Semiconductor Factories

State-of-the-art high efficiency inverter centrifugal chiller

From FY2004, Toshiba Group has been expanding the "Clean Room Econology Project" under which energy saving is promoted in all semiconductor factories in Japan. We have achieved a drastic reduction of power consumption by reducing energy use during the standby and operating periods of manufacturing equipment in cooperation with equipment manufacturers and the introduction of a minienvironment technology in clean room.
For example, in Toshiba's Oita Operations, various energysaving technologies, including those for streamlining operations of inverter centrifugal chiller in air conditioning system as well as the system as a whole and for building cold water automatic controlling systems have been developed and introduced. A CO₂ emissions reduction of 12,000 tons was actually achieved in FY2007, for which three consecutive annual awards were received from the Energy Conservation Center, Japan, as an excellent case of implementing energy conservation measures.
We are also planning to apply those energy conservation technologies to other factories.

Case 2
Contributing to Green IT Via Our Original Semiconductor Technologies

The industry's first 512 gigabyte SSD
(From the left: 512GB, 256GB and 64GB SSDs)

The power consumption of IT equipment such as personal computers, servers, communication devices and digital appliances is increasing globally and it is predicted that the power consumption of IT equipment will comprise 15-20% of overall power consumption in Japan by 2025, which is more than 5 times of the present consumption. "Green IT" is an industry-academic-government collaborative effort to control the rapid increase in power consumption.
Toshiba Group actively promotes the "Greening of IT" to save energy in IT equipment itself and the "Greening by IT" for the society using IT equipment. For example, although the high capacity memory storage devices installed in IT equipment such as personal computers normally consume larger amount of power than those of low capacity, power consumption can be reduced even with increased capacity with SSDs*¹ using NAND flash memories*² to replace conventional hard disk drives. Toshiba Group is contributing to the greening of IT equipment by utilizing its original semiconductor technologies such as the newly commercialized 512 gigabyte SSD, which is the industry's first one.

1: SSD: Solid State Drive. A NAND flash memory based on board storage device
2: NAND flash memory: A type of nonvolatile memory

Data on the Electronic Device Business (FY2008)

: General-purpose logic ICs, small-signal devices, optoelectronic devices, power devices, image information system LSIs, communication & network system LSIs, CMOS image sensors, microcomputers, LCD drivers, bipolar ICs, NAND flash memories, multi chip packages, liquid crystal displays, x-ray tubes, etc.
Sales amount
CO₂ emission reduction benefit by the Eco Products approach
CO₂ emissions with the Eco Process