What is the Circular Economy?

The fashion industry is the world’s second largest polluter behind big oil, and is responsible for around 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. There are a number of contributing factors to this problem, ranging from “fast fashion”—a model based on producing low-cost garments intended to be worn only a handful of times—to disposal of luxury overstock merchandise.  Consumers today are increasingly conscious of environmental issues. Younger generations in particular have a clear preference for environmentally friendly products—74% of millennials and 62% of Generation Z are willing to pay more for sustainable goods. Thankfully, consumer demand has caused a discernable and welcome shift towards sustainability in the fashion and apparel industry.

Bridgestone EMIA’s Original Equipment (OE) business achieved new successes in 2020, as the organisation continued to deliver on its standing as a sustainable solutions company.

As a valued and trusted partner of the world’s leading car manufacturers, Bridgestone has continuously grown its OE business in recent years thanks to its strengths in innovation, agility and expertise. With a commitment to always going the extra mile, Bridgestone EMIA’s OE business has provided over 80 new original equipment fitments to 13 car manufacturers, including Mercedes, BMW and Audi, across more than 30 different vehicle models in 2020.

A new study commissioned by the EEA shows a clear hierarchy of passenger and freight transport modes, in terms of their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Rail and waterborne transport have the lowest emissions per kilometre and unit transported, while aviation and road transport emit significantly more. Alongside shifting to rail and waterborne transport, improving the GHG efficiency of all motorised forms of transport remains an important objective. Moreover, monitoring their GHG efficiency on a regular basis would support these efforts. While active modes, such as walking and cycling, are outside the scope of the study, they are an obvious choice for clean and sustainable mobility because their emissions can be assumed to be close to zero.

Today, manufacturing and energy companies face new, intricately intertwined challenges, such as decarbonization, international regulations, and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in addition to the challenges of digital transformation (DX) efforts. AVEVA, which has promoted DX from the perspective of business operations and plant lifecycle management, integrated OSIsoft, a data management infrastructure company, in 2021. Under the new system, AVEVA organizes issues to be tackled in the future and proposes efforts to solve the issues for Japan’s process, energy, and infrastructure-related companies that have many users of OSIsoft’s PI system.