Environmental Accounting

• Fiscal 2007 summary of environmental conservation cost
• Fiscal 2007 summary of environmental conservation benefit

Panasonic's environmental accounting consists of "Environmental conservation cost" and "Environmental benefit. " Environmental benefit includes "Environmental conservation benefit" (in physical terms) and "In-house economic benefit" (in financial terms). We also evaluate "Environmental conservation benefit" (in financial terms) and "Customer economic benefit" from reductions in electricity charges through the use of our products. Of all our environmental conservation costs (or expenses), we regard the costs associated with pollution prevention, environmental remediation measures, and R&D as "indispensable environmental conservation costs" and set these costs aside from all our "other costs." To ensure that our spending is as beneficial as possible, we pay careful attention to the cost effectiveness of "other costs."
   In fiscal 2007, we made efforts to visualize the cost effectiveness of our anti-global warming measures and we clarified the criteria for calculating relevant data. In the future, we will include measures for the reduction of waste and effective use of water in our targets so that we can improve the efficiency of our entire environmental conservation measures and conduct environmental conservation activities on a continuous basis.

In fiscal 2007, the environmental conservation cost consisted of 13.8 billion yen for capital investments (up 2.7% from fiscal 2006) and 57.8 billion yen for expenses including depreciation costs and payrolls (down 0.7%). The major reason for the increased investment was mainly due to the increase in pollution prevention cost. The indispensable environmental conservation cost amounted to 30 billion yen. In the future it will be important to improve the cost effectiveness of other costs, which totaled 27.8 billion yen.

As for the environmental conservation benefit (in physical terms), it is estimated that CO₂ emissions were reduced by 1.51 million tons (equivalent to a 3,562 million kWh reduction in electricity consumption) as a result of promoting energy conservation design for our products. Regarding in-house economic benefit, sales from revenue-generating waste increased to 20.9 billion yen, up 83% from fiscal 2006, mainly due to a surge in sales prices. There is, however, a major gap between the costs we incurred for purchasing materials and the sales from revenue-generating waste, and so we are aiming to reduce the entire generation of waste, including revenue-generating waste and recyclable wastes.

[Related Data File]

• Investment trends and Expense trends
• Environmental conservation cost
• Environmental conservation benefit