Building on a tradition of climate-friendly technology and sustainability
Environmental and climate protection are defining issues of our time, and unlike many firms that are currently grappling with how to cut CO2 emissions and become more environmentally sound, we firmly believe that ecology and economy are not mutually exclusive. For Kyocera, sustainability and climate-friendly technology have never been a trend or a nice to have, they’ve been a part of our philosophy from the very beginning. Only those companies that learn to combine sustainability with profitability will survive in the long term. The task, therefore, is to find sensible ways to promote sustainability without compromising on the bottom line.
Sustainability is a common thread that runs through Kyocera’s business decisions and actions from the design of our printers and multifunctional systems, which are made to last and conserve resources.
Kyocera Document Solutions in Germany and Austria, run a climate protection programme, Print Green, which assures carbon neutrality for all printing and multifunctional systems. They partnered with the myclimate NGO to support three international climate protection projects in Kenya, Nepal and Madagascar. This means that the amount of CO2 that is generated in the production cycle – from raw materials to production, transport and recycling of toner cartridges and systems – is compensated for through the three projects. Print Green recently celebrated its 10th birthday and the projects have all been awarded the Gold Standard, an independent quality standard for CO2 compensation projects. The fact that they have already been able to offset 500,000 tons of CO2 in this way is a great achievement for Germany and Austria.
At KDZA, we also encourage and promote responsible printing behaviour among our partners and clients, such as using double-sided duplex printing as standard, in this way unnecessary CO2 emissions can be avoided. Making use of climate-neutral printer paper is also a simple, but effective step in the right direction. In addition, modern DMS solutions offer many workflow functionalities that can help to cut down on printing certain documents.
However, it is essential that we embrace sustainability as a strategic issue. By working together, we can build on Kyocera’s proud tradition of climate-friendly technology and sustainability.
Paul Wendlandt - Customer Services Support Manager - KYOCERA Document Solutions South Africa
