Mitsubishi Electric and Ebara Corporation - People Listening to the Voice of the Environment March 1996

Mitsubishi Electric and Ebara Corporation - People Listening to the Voice of the Environment March 1996
In the mid-1990s, Japanese companies shifted their thinking from pollution prevention to global environmental protection and began to incorporate environmental principles into their management. Mitsubishi Electric established the Environmental Protection Promotion Department in 1999, and under the leadership of Hidetoshi Takeuchi, environmental education was systematized for all employees from new recruits to executives. Courses were held via satellite broadcasting linking business sites across Japan, and the company sought to foster a "proper sense of crisis" in each employee, in addition to learning product assessment and energy-saving technologies. This formed an attitude of viewing environmental management as a matter of principle, not technology. EBARA also sought to transform itself into an environmental engineering company and held an "environmental seminar" where young employees and managers discussed the environment through a nature experience training program in Kiy
osato. Furthermore, the company introduced an "Environmental Contribution Reward System" to evaluate employees' familiar actions and raise environmental awareness in both their daily lives and work. The efforts of both companies symbolize the shift from a technology-centered era to an era of ethics and culture, and represent the starting point for environmental education in Japan in the 1990s.