Konica Minolta recently announced the preponement of the target year for achieving its Carbon Negative goal from 2050 to 2030. In 2017, Konica Minolta set a new goal of achieving Carbon Negative status in 2050 in its Eco Vision 2050 — a long-term environmental vision the first formulated in 2009.
While the company was striving to reduce CO2 emissions from its products throughout their entire lifecycle, the company launched new efforts to reduce CO2 emissions by more than its own CO2 emissions in collaboration with external stakeholders, including suppliers, customers, and society, to attain the new goal it has set for itself.
To realize Carbon Minus status by 2030 instead of 2050, it is necessary to accelerate the process of reducing CO2 emissions from internal and external sources. Konica Minolta is confident that its digital transformation (DX) will be useful in drastically reducing CO2 emissions from both sources and enable the company to achieve the goal by 2030.
Internal Efforts
The company has achieved the goal of procuring 100% of electricity from renewable sources at its two factories in China, and its 43 sales companies in Europe. It plans to source 100% renewable electricity for its global operations as well.
Konica Minolta is going to focus even more on its green factory activities. Assembly factories that work with many suppliers will benefit from digital manufacturing practices. Digitalization or IoT enhances the factories’ productivity by developing optimal production plans with suppliers, thus raising energy efficiency.
Efforts with suppliers
Konica Minolta promotes green supplier activities by providing expertise, advice, and support to help suppliers reduce their CO2 emissions. It intends to thus build greater trust with suppliers toward this common accelerated goal. These activities include its experts visiting suppliers’ factories to develop strategies to improve energy efficiency collaboratively and reduce CO2 emissions throughout the supply chain. Suppliers also visit Konica Minolta’s factories to learn about its environmental initiatives and know-how.
To effectively support more suppliers in their environmental efforts, Konica Minolta will offer an energy-saving diagnosis service on a digital platform. Instead of sending its experts to suppliers, suppliers can perform the entire process from assessing energy efficiency and identifying problems to taking action to improve green practices on their own. This service will also enable Konica Minolta to support more than ten times as many suppliers as before.
To assist suppliers to its renewably powered Chinese MFP factories in shifting to renewable energy sources, Konica Minolta factories’ will share their know-how on making the switch. The plan is to motivate and help them to introduce renewable sources in cooperation with other suppliers in neighboring areas.
Business and sustainable management strategy for customers
Konica Minolta is promoting its business strategy combined with its sustainability management strategy. Therefore, the growth of the company’s operations directly contributes to solving environmental problems. It not only offers energy-efficient products to reduce CO2 emissions from customers’ sites but by helping enhance their work efficiency supports their business operations. It also reduces the environmental impact of the supply chain by providing products and services that assist the end-users in their digital transformation.
These products and services include on-demand digital printing solutions for packaging, labels, and textile printing, which drastically improve the production processes. In addition, the digital workplace platforms enable customers to go paperless, work anywhere, and thus reform their conventional workstyle. And finally, edge-based IoT solutions promote workflow reforms.
Environmental Digital Platform across industry
Aware of the importance of tackling environmental problems across the industry to drastically increase its collective problem-solving ability, Konica Minolta launched the Environmental Digital Platform in cooperation with 15 Japanese companies in June 2020. The idea of the ED platform is to share and expand the environmental know-how amongst the fifteen companies and create new values together to enhance environmental management efficiency.
“By itself, Konica Minolta can address global environmental challenges only to a limited extent. However, collaborating with external stakeholders, including suppliers, customers, and society, can make a greater contribution to environmental sustainability. Konica Minolta remains committed to reducing CO2 emissions to tackle the threat of climate change in cooperation with stakeholders and to enhancing corporate value together,” the company said.
