Clean Factories - Management of the Factory Environment

In October 2006, Nanfang Weekly, a leading weekly magazine in China, unveiled a list of approx. 2,700 companies, including Panasonic Battery (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., that violated environmental preservation laws and regulations. The list detailed those companies that had violated environmentrelated laws and regulations by local environmental preservation authorities in China, and that had been published on authority websites between 2004 and 2006.
   Panasonic Battery was described as a company that "was not able to ensure the normal functioning of its wastewater treatment facilities and discharged wastewater that exceeded statutory safety levels." This referred to an incident in October 2005, in which the company discharged wastewater whose COD level temporarily recorded 145mg/l against the statutory 100mg/l level. This was a result of mistakenly releasing wastewater to the Environment without prior processing in the wastewater treatment system, during aqueous cleaning of finished battery storage trays.which was not the company's normal practice. The environmental preservation authorities in Shanghai levied fines on the company.
   The company immediately took measures to prevent the recurrence of such irregularities. It established a special cleaning area, changed drainage channels, and retrained employees. Panasonic took special notice of this situation and overhauled the environmental management practices of all our factories throughout the world.

[Related Data File]

• Management by setting voluntary standards more stringent than national laws
• Cases in which pollutant levels exceeded legal criteria
• Impact on the air
• Impact on the public waterways