Furukawa Electric Group defines environmentally friendly products as products or services that contribute to reducing environmental impact or have positive effect on the environment assessing the entire lifecycle of our products.
For the products compatible with environmentally friendly products, the environmental mark “e-Friendly” is displayed on the exterior and the catalogues to encourage their adoption.
The Group's environmentally friendly products belong to one of four categories described below. These links are only available in Japanese.
| Category | Contents |
|---|---|
| Prevention of global warming |
Products with functions that contribute to the reduction or absorption/fixation of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through the entire life cycles, or products that have reduced the greenhouse gas in their manufacturing processes. |
| Zero emission |
Products made from recycled materials, products designed with easy to-recycle components, products made from materials or with design facilitating volume reduction for lowering waste volume, products designed to share common components with other products or products designed as common components. |
| Elimination of materials that have an impact on the environment |
The products that meet one of the followings.
|
| Resource savings |
Products that result in overall energy savings by such means as reducing the use of raw materials and components as well as scarce resources, featuring enhanced longevity, allowing easier product and component maintenance, and reducing the use for resources in packaging. |
To register products as environmentally friendly, products must go through an application and screening process in their business division and then be examined by the Environmentally Friendly Products Committee, a cross-departmental committee of the Group.
The criteria that products have to meet to be registered as an environmentally friendly product is an overall improvement of environmental performance when compared with existing products based on established evaluation criteria at each stage of the product’s lifecycle: the purchase of raw materials and parts, production, use, distribution and disposal.
In order to increase the ratio of the environmentally friendly products in all the products of the Group , we set targets based on percentage of sales, and confirm our progress and success on this basis.
TOPICS "Copper alloy products/superconducting products manufactured with renewable energy"
Utilizing Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), the Group is working on visualizing the contribution to the reduction amount of CO₂ emissions generated during the use phase of the Group products by customers. For number of units sold of micro ITLA in optical communications, copper foil for lithium-ion batteries and aluminum harnesses in automotive sector, we estimated the contribution to the reduction of CO₂ emissions by estimating the number of new cars sold that will be equipped with these products based on the production volume. The total amount of the contribution to the reduction of CO₂ emissions was 130 thousand tons-CO₂/year including the amount of those in GREEN TROUGH* adopted in the field of railways, roads, and renewable energy. We will continue to keep an eye on the global market, strive to expand the range of product types that contribute to the environment, and expand our efforts to address global environmental issues through our products.
GREEN TROUGH*: environmentally friendly cable trough made primarily from waste plastic
* The rectangular magnet wire will be excluded from FY2020 due to business transfer.
