Investing in Sustainability with Canon’s Life Cycle Assessment
In a world where the problems of today include global warming and rising levels of pollution, more businesses are stepping up to become more environmentally aware of their practices and making sure they do their part for the environment. Canon has implemented its Life Cycle Assessment initiative in a bid to reduce environmental impact throughout a product’s lifecycle, which aims to promote a greater sense of environmental awareness throughout the life cycle of its products. Here’s how sustainability fits into our plan towards protecting the Earth and its environment!
What is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?
Canon’s Life Cycle Assessment methodology is a quantitative evaluation of its products throughout the product lifecycle from material procurement to manufacturing, distribution and disposal or recycling. The evaluation includes the product’s input resources, environmental impact and their latent environmental influence on the earth and ecological systems throughout the entire product lifecycle.
What are Canon’s LCA Commitments?
1. Environmentally-conscious design at every phase
Canon’s LCA development management system aims to reduce the environmental impact of our products throughout the product lifecycle, from the sourcing of materials to the energy consumption during use all the way to the disposal and or recycling process. Canon does this by meticulously managing and tracing the carbon emissions from the product’s development to its design phases.
By ensuring that carbon emissions are monitored and calculated at each stage, Canon is able to have a more accurate understanding of our production processes and use the information to work towards our goals.
2. Internationally-recognised Evaluation Standards
Canon has also conducted environmental label registration by using the “JEMAI Environmental Labelling Program”, which conforms to the standards set by the JEMAI (Japan Environmental Management Association for Industry).
The JEMAI Environmental Labelling Program quantitatively shows the environmental information of products through whole lifecycle stages from the extraction of resources to disposal and recycling. The evaluation items of this program comprises the influence of each stage of the life cycle on greenhouse gas emission, energy resource consumption, mineral resource consumption, and acidification. Through its labelling process, Canon ensures that products’ environmental information is easily understood.
In addition, Canon also uses certification systems like the Carbon Footprint of Products (CFP*1) or “Eco Leaf*2” that enables the disclosure of different environmental influence indexes.
3. Making sure our partners share the same environmental values
Beyond considering the factors including product usage and materials into our LCA index, Canon also comprehensively evaluates its production of greenhouse gases, bearing in mind that production processes also contribute to the indirect influence on the environment.
With the third-party assurance of Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions in all categories, Canon ensures that our eco-goals are adopted throughout the entire product supply chain by working with partners who are also environmentally-conscious.
Ultimately, Canon’s LCA makes transparent the impact of our products on the environment and makes clear the efforts Canon makes in order to evolve into a more sustainable business in time to come.
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