Panasonic adds ecological agenda to business plan

Panasonichas announced its renewed commitment to climate change by adding ecological goals to its "GP3 Plan" three-year business plan that completes March 2010.

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¡ªreduction of environmental burden in all areas of its business activities.

As a manufacturing company, the company aims to reduce CO₂ emissions from its manufacturing operations in terms of total global levels rather than on a per basic unit basis. Further, Panasonic will count CO₂ elimination as one of its main management indicators. To be specific, Panasonic aims to eliminate 300,000 tons of CO₂ emissions during the three years covered by the GP3 plan, lowering the total CO₂In addition, starting fiscal year 2009, Panasonic will include CO₂ emissions to its critical management indicators including sales, operating profit, inventory and CCM3 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 consumptionsuch as electricity, gas and fuel oil, among others. The system started this month in Japan and will be implemented at all manufacturing locations including overseas facilities in January 2008.