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I have been involved in the nuclear power generation business since I entered the company. The design of piping systems, the first task on which I worked, requires a comprehensive understanding of a huge nuclear energy system as a whole, as well as the organization of an enormous project through the coordination of a large number of designers over a long period of time. I sometimes ran up against huge brick walls and needed to return to the starting point and think “why did this happen?” I then realized I needed to fully exercise my imagination. Even after I took up a managerial post, these formative experiences of my early years at Toshiba have supported me.
Today, we are urged to cope with global warming and other critical environmental problems, and furthermore, we have to recover from the aftereffects of the once-in-a-century global economic crisis. Even under these circumstances, the option of pushing environmental problems aside simply does not exist. As we state “Committed to People, Committed to the Future” in our slogan, we at Toshiba Group consider business administration and environmental management as one and the same thing. We trust that now is the time to overcome huge barriers like the environmental crisis and the economic crisis through our powers of imagination underpinned by a sharp sensitivity to the times and powers of conception.
Mankind has been blessed with, and continued to live in, a varied, sound global environment since time immemorial. We have to thank the Earth for its blessings and hand it over to future generations. Today, however, the impact of human activities on the environment exceeds the environmental capacity of the Earth, bringing about such crises as global warming and depletion of natural resources and jeopardizing the global ecosystem. It is necessary to realize a sustainable society by carrying out initiatives aimed at a low-carbon society, a recyclingbased society, and a society that coexists with nature.
Toshiba Group manages its business operations as a corporate citizen of planet Earth with the future of the world in mind. Underlying this commitment is a corporate culture that emphasizes “integrity,” which means soundness and sincerity. With compliance with laws and regulations as a fundamental premise, all managers and employees of Toshiba Group are required to act in accordance with the Toshiba Group Standards of Conduct. And we have formulated the Toshiba Group Environmental Vision 2050 to realize a vision of a world in which “People lead richer lifestyles in harmony with the Earth” by 2050. Under this vision, we believe that it is the mission of Toshiba Group as a corporate citizen of planet Earth to reduce environmental impacts and create new value by steadily achieving the specific goals set in the Voluntary Environmental Plans.
In order to realize a sustainable society, which makes environmental protection consistent with economic growth, all nations in the world have to ensure that the world’s total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions peak within 10 to 20 years from now and halve them by 2025. Furthermore, advanced nations have to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% by that same year.
Toshiba Group is engaged in businesses that cover all energy-related areas from the generation of energy to its consumption. We will fulfill our social responsibility by making maximum efforts and contributions to mitigate global warming. In particular, we believe that the Group’s most advanced technologies such as nuclear power generation, CO2 separation and collection technology, photovoltaic power generation, new rechargeable batteries, and new lighting using light-emitting diodes (LED) will contribute greatly to the realization of a sustainable society by offering new value, which we call “value innovations.”
On the other hand, in all processes from development to production to marketing and sales, we have to pursue “process innovations” to reform the conventional way of doing business. Toshiba Group is actively carrying out various initiatives to curb increases in greenhouse gas emissions from the operation of its offices as a result of business expansion and keep them at 70% of the 1990 level or less by 2012 and from that year on reduce them by 10% by 2025. In order to achieve these goals, we will make an all-out effort to take energy-saving measures and use renewable energy for a wider range of our operations, thus reducing the overall greenhouse gas emissions.
The year 2010 is designated as the International Year of Biodiversity, and the 10th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Biological Diversity will be held in Nagoya in October 2010. In addition, as typified by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry’s guidelines for corporate biodiversity-related activities, there is a strong movement under way to urge business firms to make efforts to protect biodiversity.
Since early on, we have paid attention to how our core business operations were related to the protection of biodiversity and used a comprehensive environmental assessment method, which incorporates the impacts of business operations on biodiversity into the overall environmental assessment of business operations. In the future, we will deepen our understanding of the relationship between business operations and biodiversity and pursue an ideal way of carrying out business operations in a sound and sincere way-in other words, with integrity.
Some 130 years ago, Hisashige Tanaka, the founder of Toshiba, who lived in an age of upheavals from the last days of the Tokugawa regime to the Meiji period, was always ahead of the times he lived in to meet the demands of society and he continued to pursue inventions that would excite and surprise people.
With an insatiably inquisitive spirit and a fiery passion, both of which we inherited from the founder and his successors (Toshiba’s DNA, so to speak), in our mind, we will evolve by exercising our powers of imagination, looking hard at what things will be like five years or 10 years from now or even farther into the future, and bringing about innovations one after another. And through innovative approaches to energy and eco products, two areas on which Toshiba Group focuses, we will also lead the world in realizing a low-carbon society as we take measures to cope with global warming, today’s most urgent issue.
As a leading eco company, based on the concept of being a corporate citizen of planet Earth, which keeps integrity in mind, Toshiba Group will make a positive approach to society and contribute to the future of a sustainable earth with the aim of realizing a world in which all people live richer lifestyles in harmony with the Earth.
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