Greener Japanese Companies

There is a long list of Japanese companies that are investing in sustainable innovation. Many of the world's best known Japanese brands are seeing the wisdom of green.

Sharp has built a solar-cell factory that raised its output to 1.3GW last year, from 790MW the year before. According to Ernst & Young, we could see a fourfold growth in Japan’s solar panel market by 2020.

Sanyo has re-emerged as the world’s largest maker of rechargeable batteries as well as a producer of solar panels. On April 1, 2011, Sanyo Electric became a wholly owned susbsidury of Panasonic.

Panasonic is expanding its energy businesses, from electric-vehicle batteries to hydrogen fuel-cell generators, and hopes to more than triple revenues from the segment to Y3,000bn ($36.4bn) by 2018. Like many other companies in Japan, Panasonic is also making its manufacturing operations greener, doubling the ratio of recycled materials used in its products and raising the recycling rate for its own industrial waste to virtually 100 per cent.

Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors have begun selling battery-driven electric vehicles, building on a green-car market pioneered by Toyota's top-selling Prius hybrid.

© 2011, Richard Matthews. All rights reserved.

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The Growth of the Green Market

The green market has been growing fast and shows no signs of slowing. The global environmental industry is presently worth almost one and a half trillion dollars and it is expected to double in the next decade.

Even in an economic environment marked by widespread declines, the green market showed steady growth. In 2007 the green market grew 8%. In 2008 as the wider economy began feeling the effects of the most serious downturn since the Great Depression, the green market managed to grow a remarkable 3%.

Forecasts published in July 2009, by US trade publication Environmental Business Journal (EBJ) expected a 2009 growth rate 0.6% for the US environmental industry. However, the EBJ described 0.6% growth as a significant achievement given that the prevailing estimates expected the US gross domestic product (GDP) to contract by 2-4% in 2009.

On June 17 2010, the Dubai Chamber of Commerce & Industry released a newsletter that indicates the global market for environmental products and services will double by 2020.

Established in 1965, the Dubai Chamber of Commerce & Industry is a non-profit public entity, whose mission is to represent, support and protect the interests of the business community in Dubai by creating a favorable business environment, supporting the development of business, and by promoting Dubai as an international business hub.

The Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry's Centre for Responsible Business (CRB) has released this year's fourth issue of its bi-monthly newsletter, CSR Al Youm. The newsletter addresses the opportunities, competencies and complexities of the Green Market. According to the newsletter, the green market will double from $1.37 trillion a year in 2010 to $2.74 trillion by 2020.

The news that the green market will double in the next decade adds to the growing number of reports that point to vast opportunities.
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Sustainability is an Unstoppable Megatrend

Sustainability is not a passing fad or a marketing gimmick, it is a worldwide movement that is changing the way we do business. Sustainability entails continued development or growth, without significant deterioration of the environment and depletion of natural resources on which human well-being depends. This definition measures income as flow of goods and services that an economy can generate indefinitely without reducing its natural productive capacity.

Sustainability is more than a trend, a trend reflects a pattern of gradual change in a condition, output, or process, or an average or general tendency of a series of data points to move in a certain direction over time, represented by a line or curve on a graph. The term megatrend was popularized by John Naisbitt in his 1982 bestseller "Megatrends". Rather than being a function of a series of data points, the term megatrend reflects a general shift in thinking or approach affecting entire countries, industries, and organizations.

In the May 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review there is a feature article titled ‘The Sustainability Imperative’. The feature is written by David Lubin from the Sustainability Network and Daniel Esty from Yale University. Together they argue that sustainability is the next transformational business megatrend comparable to mass production, manufacturing quality movement, IT revolution, and globalization.

The authors suggest firms seeking to gain a competitive advantage must know what to do and how to do it. With many already onboard businesses must act now, as this unstoppable megatrend will make or break companies around the world.

Although we are still at a relatively early stage of the sustainability megatrend, it can be expected to continue to grow exponentially.
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Next: Sustainable Business Methods, Strategy, Management and Reporting / Sustainable Successes and Failures

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