Panasonic has announced its renewed commitment to climate change by adding ecological goals to its "GP3" three-year business plan.

The global manufacturer of consumer electronics and home appliances completes the plan in March 2010.

The company has also presented its "Panasonic Eco Ideas Declaration" identifying the three initiatives – Eco ideas for products, Eco ideas for manufacturing, and Eco ideas for everybody, everywhere - on which its environmental management activities focus.

In its pursuit of global excellence, Panasonic launched the GP3 plan in April 2007, setting goals and milestones such as achieving steady growth with profitability. The company has now added a new challenge in the ecological field to the GP3 plan - reduction of environmental burden in all areas of its business activities. Panasonic will strive to fulfill this ecological responsibility while realizing profitable growth, a statement said.

As a manufacturing company, Panasonic aims to reduce CO2 emissions from its manufacturing operations in terms of total global levels rather than on a per basic unit basis. Further, the company will count CO2 elimination as one of its main management indicators.

“With the increasing concern among the international community in the background, Panasonic has responded by accelerating its efforts in environmental management. This is also in line with our management philosophy that calls for contribution to the society through business activities. Our Eco Ideas Declaration reflects Panasonic’s reinforced commitment to the mitigation of climate change as a global corporate citizen, and apart from delivering energy-efficient products and reducing CO2 emissions in all our activities, we will also encourage the spread of environmental activities around the world,” said  Seiji Koyanagi, managing director, Panasonic Marketing Middle East.

“Even if the total production capacity increases in the future, we will use the performance level of fiscal year 2007 as a yardstick for measuring progress in eliminating CO2 emissions from our 294 manufacturing sites across the world,” he added.

Panasonic aims to eliminate 300,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions during the three years covered by the GP3 plan, lowering the total CO2 level to 3.68 million tonnes in fiscal year 2010 from 3.98 million tonnes in fiscal year 2007. In fiscal year 2011, the company intends to bring it down further to around 3.60 million tonnes, the level of fiscal year 2001.

Starting fiscal year 2009, Panasonic will include CO2 emissions to its critical management indicators including sales, operating profit and inventory as a method of reinforcing its efforts to address climate protection.

In April this year, the company established an environmental performance system to collect monthly performance data on 23 items from the manufacturing locations worldwide and analyze and feed the results back to them for further improvements. The 23 environmental performance data items include CO2 emissions as well as water and energy consumption such as electricity, gas and fuel oil, among others. The system, which started this month in Japan, will be implemented at all manufacturing locations including overseas facilities in January 2008, it said. – TradeArabia News Service