Environmentally Conscious Products Come from Green Heart Factories

DAIKIN’S APPROACH

Striving to Reduce Environmental Impact in Manufacturing as Our Business Expands Worldwide

Under the Fusion 20 strategic management plan, Daikin aims to both expand business and contribute to the environment. As our business expands, the number of manufacturing bases increases each year and so does our environmental impact. Besides just developing and promoting the adoption of environmentally conscious products, we strive to decrease the environmental impact of our manufacturing activities.

Based on the belief that environmentally conscious products can only come from environmentally conscious factories, the entire Daikin Group works to make this happen through efforts such as setting in-house environmental standards and holding environmental conferences.

Daikin Group Net Sales and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Production

DAIKIN'S PERFORMANCE

Evaluating and Certifying Production Bases' Environmental Efforts under a Globally Unified Standard

In fiscal 2005, Daikin began implementing a system for certifying environmentally conscious plants using an in-house standard. We established our Green Heart Factory (GHF) standard, a unified Group standard for evaluating social contribution and other socially efforts, in addition to environmentally efforts such as reduction of energy, fluorocarbons, and water use, reduction of waste generated and chemicals used, and the use of renewable energy. Factories with high scores under this standard are certified as Green Heart Factories.

Under the GHF standard, production bases conduct more transparent efforts and compete with each other to achieve high scores. The GHF standard also encourages all employees at a base to work together to achieve certification and raises their environmental awareness.

In fiscal 2017, we revised the GHF standard to raise the quality of environmental activities and established four certification ranks. Under the new standard, 24 of 68 bases achieved GHF certification. Our goal is to have all production bases GHF certified by fiscal 2020.

GHF Standard Certification System (revised in fiscal 2017)

Bases Boost Their Energy-Efficiency Measures through Concrete Improvement and Information Sharing

Daikin holds global environmental meetings in five regions (Japan, Europe, the U.S., China, and Asia/Oceania). Besides periodically confirming the state and progress of each base's environmental efforts at these regional meetings, since 2013 we have been holding a biannual Global Environmental Meeting attended by environmental managers from Daikin bases in each of the five worldwide regions.

In April 2017, Daikin Industries Czech Republic s.r.o hosted the 3rd Global Environmental Meeting with attendance by 79 representatives of 27 bases. In addition to sharing improvement case studies at various bases, participants practiced analysis methods in hands-on data measurement workshops aimed at making energy usage more transparent and reducing the use of unnecessary energy. They also discussed standards for making investment decisions in the creation of measures. Furthermore, in order to continue reducing energy use at production facilities, participants confirmed things like future tasks, the development of new production methods, and environmental action promotion systems.

Through these efforts, we are stepping up group-wide energy-saving measures and have set targets of reducing greenhouse gas emissions against fiscal 2005 by 70% by fiscal 2020 and by 75% by fiscal 2025. In fiscal 2017, we succeeded in achieving a 74% reduction.

NEXT CHALLENGE

Achieve Sustainable Growth While Reducing the Environmental Impact of Production Activities

We can foresee that as Daikin's business continues to expand, production volumes around the world will increase. To counter this, we will continue to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from production activities by strengthening collaboration among our global production bases so that they can reduce Daikin's overall environmental impact while achieving sustainable growth.