After I joined the company, I worked mainly in the production divi-sion and the procurement division, which purchases materials and
components from companies outside Toshiba Group. I was stationed
outside Japan—including the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and
the United States—for a total of 14 years. In the Philippines, where I
worked for four years (1996-2000), I led efforts to obtain ISO 14001
(international standards for environmental management) certifi-cation in order to accelerate environmental initiatives at the local
production site. At that time, in emerging countries, a higher priority
was still placed on the economy, and environmental issues were
not taken as seriously as they are today. But out of necessity to take
immediate action based on taking a hard look at what things would
be like in the future, I expanded activities to involve the entire site
through daily discussions with local employees, and this led to our
obtaining ISO 14001 certification.
Immediately after I became director in charge of environmental
affairs at Toshiba’s head office in 2011, I started to develop a grand
design aimed at becoming one of the world’s foremost eco-com-panies by 2015. We established specific performance domains that
should be achieved in 2015 as we pursue our vision for 2015 as one
of the world’s foremost eco-companies, and formulated four strat-egies
*1
to achieve this vision and the Fifth Environmental Action
Plan
*2
—a specific plan to implement the strategies.
Today, as seen by the frequent occurrence of disasters due to
abnormal weather around the world, problems are surfacing that
appear to be attributed to the effects of climate change. Mean-while, in emerging countries, the problems of waste generated as
a result of economic development—as well as problems arising
from air and water pollution—are becoming increasingly serious;
we cannot afford to put off taking measures to cope with these
environmental issues. I believe that the quickest way to solve these
problems is for each and every one of Toshiba employees world-wide to share the same mind-set and work together with a sense
of solidarity.