Collaboration with Suppliers

As a globally operating company, we must consider the environmental impacts of our entire supply chain, and not just of our own operations. Through our coordination efforts with suppliers and transportation partners, who form an integral part of our business operations, we strive to minimize our environmental impact across the entire supply chain, focusing on the reduction of CO₂ emissions, resource recycling, chemical substance management, and biodiversity conservation.

We issued our Green Procurement Standards in March 1999 and are actively engaging in green procurement in order to promote the manufacture of environmentally conscious products in partnership with our suppliers. As a first step in collaborating with suppliers and achieving the goals outlined in our environmental action plan-Green Plan 2018-we issued an updated sixth version of our Green Procurement Standards in January 2012. This renewed policy aims to build a group of suppliers providing products and goods to Panasonic to support our 100th anniversary vision, reduce the environmental impact of their business activities, share achievements through collaboration, and encourage upstream suppliers in our supply chain to reduce their environmental impact.

• Green Procurement Standards

In addition to ongoing requests to build environmental management systems and ensure our chemical substance management policy, we ask suppliers to accelerate their efforts toward identifying and reducing GHG emissions, recycling resources, and protecting biodiversity.

We have launched a trial to identify GHG emissions in our supply chain as a first step toward implementing reduction efforts. We began with suppliers selected according to provisional calculations of the GHG emissions of products delivered to Panasonic in order to first identify any issues arising from suppliers’ GHG calculation processes. We briefed raw material suppliers and electrical/ electronic component manufacturers in July 2011 and parts manufacturers in November 2011, urging suppliers to calculate and submit appropriate GHG emissions data. We received replies from 84 consenting suppliers, with global calculations taking into account GHG emissions from supplier domains, upstream domains (raw material suppliers and component manufacturers), and downstream domains (domestic import and logistics companies). The total emissions of products delivered by the 84 suppliers to Panasonic were about 2.83 million tons. We will commit to promoting these initiatives while considering factors like economic rationality between Panasonic and suppliers and the completeness of collected data.

Since fiscal 2010, we have been implementing the ECOVC^*1 Activity with our suppliers. This program seeks out ways in our parts procurement activities to save energy and resources or use recycled materials, which at the same time aims to rationalize costs. In fiscal 2011, we expanded the focus on Recycling-oriented Manufacturing in addition to the original objective of reducing CO₂ emissions.

In fiscal 2012, we received 901 proposals from suppliers around the world on ways to reduce energy consumption in products and factories, as well as proposals about how to make products smaller and lighter, and to use fewer parts. We wanted to share the best of these proposals with all our suppliers, and so we established the Panasonic Excellent Partners Meeting, which is attended by all our suppliers worldwide.

In the future, we will implement this ECO-VC Activity throughout the supply chain.from procurement to distribution.to reach many more suppliers and reduce CO₂, lower costs, and promote Recycling-oriented Manufacturing (minimizing resources used, recycling, and switching to non-petroleum materials).

• *1 VC: Value Creation.

In addition to complying with environmental laws, we have called on our upstream suppliers to reduce their environmental impact in the updated Green Procurement Standards, further extending our supply chain initiatives to reduce our environmental impact.