Corporate Japan is making strides in sustainable development, slashing the use of lead and other toxic substances in industry, embracing solar energy and making biodegradable plastic out of sugar beets.
Automobiles and electronics, two of the sectors in which Japan floods the world with its goods, have in recent years been at the forefront of environmentally friendly production.
Japanese industry is responding both to the pressures from the Kyoto Protocol and to new anti-pollution directives in the EU, a key market.
The Kyoto treaty, which went into effect in February, obliges Japan to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 6 percent by 2008-2012 from the 1990 level.
The government is determined to comply and has publicly mulled imposing taxes to whip the world's second-largest economy into shape. But industry opposes the taxes -- and some companies have already gone ahead on their own to help Japan go green.
Electronics giant Fujitsu set out as its goal to cut back consumption of electricity, oil and gas by 25 percent in the year to March last year from 1990-'91 levels. It surpassed its own target with a reduction of 28.6 percent.
Another electronic powerhouse, Toshiba, has declared global warming "an environmental issue of fundamental importance to our existence on the planet" and set out targets in terms of carbon dioxide emissions.
Toshiba, which also makes nuclear reactors, has asked its factories and laboratories to cut back emissions by 25 percent between 1990-'91 and 2010-'11. As of 2003-'4, Toshiba has managed a drop of 10 percent.
"I know that Japan is ahead in both its thinking and achievements in this field," Thierry Desmarest, the CEO of the French oil group Total, told a French-Japanese forum on sustainable development on March 28 in Tokyo.
"Among industrialized countries, Japan is the leader both in saving energy and in energy efficiency," he said.
The Japanese government finances projects for a greener economy under the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), part of the powerful Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, with a budget of US$2.274 billion in the year which ended last month, of it US$1.495 billion for research and development.
Japan has made sustainable development the principal theme of the 21st century's first World Exposition, the six-month international exhibition which began in late March in a forest park of central Aichi province.
NEDO is using the Expo to show off some of its eco-friendly technology, including a power generation system based on fuel cells and solar energy which runs the host country's pavilion.
The Expo is taking place in the fiefdom of Japan's largest company Toyota Motor, which was the world's first automaker to use bioplastics for interior parts of its vehicles.
It has set up a factory which will each year produce 1,000 tonnes of plastic whose base is partly sugar beets, which makes the material biodegradable and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. The idea behind the factory is not only the automobile supply line but any sector which is interested.
Toyota and its competitor Honda were among the first to make fuel-cell cars which run on hydrogen and methanol and whose sole waste is water vapor, even though the production of hydrogen still causes greenhouse gas emissions.
In addition, Japan has more than 292,000 vehicles which run on natural gas, according to a Japanese vehicle inspection association.
Japan is also by far the leader in solar energy, last year accounting for more than 51 percent of world photovoltaic cell production in terms of electrical power measured in megawatts, according to the US-based specialized publication PV News.
Japan's Sharp was number one for the fifth year in the solar energy production at 27 percent of the world's photovoltaic production, with fellow Japanese firm Kyocera coming in second, according to the journal.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
RSS