"Protecting Pure Water, Clean Air, and Beautiful Forests" (Fuji Photo Film Co.)

JFS Newsletter No.30 (February 2005)
"TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE JAPAN - CORPORATIONS AT WORK" ARTICLE SERIES Article No. 23
http://home.fujifilm.com/info/index.html
http://home.fujifilm.com/info/environment/report.html

Japan's Fuji Photo Film Co. (Fujifilm) is a global corporation that provides products and services in the areas of imaging, information, and documents. Established in 1934 as a manufacturer of photo-sensitive materials like photographic film, it has been expanding its business by offering a wide range of imaging and information products such as cameras, printing and medical equipment, copying machines, and other related equipment. Today the company operates in more than 200 regions in the world, with over 73,000 employees. In fiscal 2003, the sales for the entire group were 2,560.3 billion yen (about U.S.$24.9 billion), and with 52 percent in Japan, 21 percent in the Americas, 14 percent in Europe, and 12 percent in Asia and other regions.

Japanese consumers first noticed Fujifilm's attention to environmental issues thanks to its recycling system for "lens-attached film" cameras, named QuickSnap, which were launched in 1986. A lens-attached film camera was generally a simple camera intended for one-time use only, but the company developed QuickSnap, to be a recyclable product, not a disposable one.

QuickSnap was designed with recycling in mind, to be disassembled easily and not create waste. Used QuickSnaps are collected at photo shops throughout the country. At recycling/manufacturing plants, they are taken apart to be recycled and reused in new QuickSnap cameras, which are then sold. Such a recycling system has also been introduced in group companies in Europe and the United States. Since the original launch of QuickSnap, the company has made repeated improvements of the product to facilitate its recycling. With these efforts it has achieved a recyclable rate of 95 percent (by weight), and now it is making efforts to raise the collection rate from the current 60 percent to 100 percent.

Manufacturing of photographic films requires a large amount of pure water and clean air. Because of this, since it was founded the company has paid attention to environmental consideration and protection as a basis for its business activities. In 1994 it established a basic policy on the environment to strengthen its overall activities. Five years later, the company introduced the idea of "responsible care," and in 2002, established the "Fujifilm Group Green Policy" to improve product quality and business activities with regard to the environment. http://www.nikkakyo.org/organizations/jrcc/top_e.html (Japan Responsible Care Council)

The company's green policy puts the greatest emphasis on how much it can reduce the environmental impacts of its products, because Fujifilm believes that the biggest environmental impacts of manufacturers are from their products.

All products are designed based on the company's "Basic Rules for Design for Environment," and any product that cannot meet the detailed environmental standards in each product category will not make it to the production stage. The group companies are also starting to introduce systems with these basic rules. http://home.fujifilm.com/info/environment/protection.html

The "Basic Rules for Design for Environment" stipulate what Fujifilm should consider throughout the product life-cycle, from the mining of raw materials to production, use and disposal, in six categories: safety, green procurement, resource saving, disclosure of environmental information, packaging and distribution, and regulatory compliance. The company pays particular attention to ensure the safety of chemical substances since it handles a large number of them.

For example, photographic film alone contains more than 100 kinds of chemical substances. The company's research department has created new substances to develop and improve its products. The Fujifilm Group uses about 5,000 different chemical substances in total. The company evaluates the safety of these chemicals on various criteria, classifies them into five classes, from "prohibited" to "general control" substances, and manages the risk of chemical substances globally throughout the manufacturing process, from development and material selection to disposal. Furthermore, the company is developing safer alternatives to replace chemicals of concern such as endocrine disrupting chemicals and fluorinated organic compounds, and monitoring them as special control substances.

During product development and manufacture, Fujifilm places high value on the concept of Green and Sustainable Chemistry (GSC). GSC is a concept of chemical technologies that promotes innovation and improvements in product and process design, formulation and applications of chemical substances in order to minimize human and environmental impacts, and avoids as much as possible the use of chemicals that produce waste of raw materials, solvents, and intermediate substances. This idea has been advocated over the last several years in the chemical industry.

One of the examples of technological development by Fujifilm is "aqueous-coated photothermographic film." In 2002, this film won the first GSC Award, given by the Green & Sustainable Chemistry Network, a body that promotes GSC and consists of chemistry-related academic societies and organizations in Japan. http://www.gscn.net/indexE.html (Green & Sustainable Chemical Network)

At medical institutions, photothermographic films, which need no liquid developer, are used to print images taken by diagnostic imaging devices through computed radiography (CR), computerized tomography (CT) scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). To produce dry imaging film such as this, a large amount of organic solvents is normally required to coat the film with photosensitive material. After more than three years of effort, however, Fujifilm succeeded in developing a water-based solvent coating technology and was able to reduce the discharge of organic solvents during production by 10,000 tons or more annually. This aqueous-coated photothermographic film is welcomed at medical facilities because it produces no odor from solvents during film processing or diagnosis.

The company has also been successfully reducing volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions from production processes thanks to two measures. One is to improve solvents, by reducing the use of VOCs by replacing conventional solvents with new ones that have a high-boiling point or with water-based solvents. The other is to reduce the amount of VOC emissions into the atmosphere by improving their equipment. In fiscal 2003, Fujifilm achieved its target of VOC emission reduction by half from the fiscal 2000 levels, a goal stated in the Fujifilm Group Green Policy, one year earlier than originally planned. The company has focused particularly on reducing the use of dichloromethane, one of the main VOC emissions, through research into alternative materials.

The company has created its own green procurement standards to evaluate environmental friendliness of parts and materials. With these standards, Fujifilm requests its suppliers not to use chemical substances banned by national laws, and to manage and control the substances listed by the company for reduction and content controls. The company is making its best effort to control chemical substances through workshops, monitoring of management systems, and the actual testing of products shipped to its suppliers.

In addition, Fujifilm regards it as an important aspect of risk management to build trust with communities around its factories, and makes a proactive effort to communicate with them. Four factories in Japan invite 10 to 20 local residents to their factories once or twice a year and offers them factory tours to see cleanup systems and waste disposal processes, in order to demonstrate their attention to safe manufacturing. Concerns from residents are mostly about emergency responses such as disasters and accidents. The company tries to be as open as possible and makes an effort to provide adequate explanations to gain their understanding.

In the fall of 2003, Fujifilm held an environmental exchange forum, co-organized by Kanagawa Prefecture and Minami Ashigara City, with over 100 participants at the company's main production facility, the Ashigara Factory. The theme of the forum was exchanging ideas about chemical substances and the environment in order to raise the level of awareness among local residents. Fujifilm received a favorable response from the participants, many of whom requested that this initiative be continued, so the company plans to hold the forum in other areas in the future.

Finally, we introduce the Fujifilm's latest community activity, Forests Forever, which started in April 2004. Forests Forever is a website that aims at raising awareness of the environment by showing the abundance of nature and the beauty of forests. The company utilized the techniques and experience it has accumulated over the years to create a website for the advancement of a society that appreciates the potential of photography to express beauty. http://www.forests-forever.com (English-Japanese)

The website features forests as the symbol of the Earth, and tries to find the best way to express the forest's mysteries and vital energy. It receives between 200,000 and 500,000 page views a month. Comments from users are very positive. For example: "It was as if I could feel the complexity, preciousness and gentleness of the forests," and "The pictures were profoundly moving." The website contains galleries of forests in Japan and around the world, and messages from people who are intimate with forests around the world. Plans are now underway to use the website for databases on the latest trends of the global environment.

Fujifilm is trying not only to reduce the environmental impacts of its business activities, but also to promote a shift toward a sustainable future. This website is remarkable in appealing to people's emotion through the beauty created with the company's techniques, and expresses the company's commitment to foster the hope to preserve the world's precious, beautiful forests for future generations. Please visit the website and see for yourself.