OfS won’t be silent on sustainability

When devices such as computers, smart phones and batteries are sent for recycling, not all the materials are captured for use in new devices. Specialist coatings are often made with rare and expensive materials to enable our modern electronics to work. However, these coatings can cause problems when it comes to recycling and the materials are not always recovered but incinerated to produce ‘heat from waste’. This means that the expensive, highly engineered coating has been lost and its value not realised.” “adhesives often make our phones water tight and ensure longer lifetimes of electronic products, however when it comes to recycling these products the adhesives make it difficult to take the products apart, wavelength sensitive adhesives would make this more straightforward.

At OMRON, our aim is to contribute to the creation of a sustainable society and enhance corporate value, by using our OMRON Principles to solve social issues through our business activities. In order to make this a reality, we feel it is very important to identify the material sustainability issues upon which OMRON should focus, incorporate these into medium to long-term strategies and then establish specific initiatives, and through our business activities, solve these problems. Based upon this, we identified and set targets for 15 sustainability issues under the VG2.0 medium-term management plan which started in fiscal 2017, from the viewpoints of stakeholders and OMRON. In fiscal 2018, OMRON established a company-wide management structure aimed at achieving our year 2020 Sustainability Goals, and accelerated implementation of our initiatives.

The development of safe and sustainable nuclear energy fuels forms an essential part of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s energy security mission.