Endeavor to create a circular economy

The Mitsui Chemicals Group has contributed to improving convenience in people’s lives and helped solve challenges in society through the supply of chemical products and high-performance plastic products. At the same time, our business activities require the substantial use of fossil resources and energy, which emits large volumes of greenhouse gasses (GHGs). Also, there are concerns over environmental pollution caused by plastic waste flowing into the oceans and other areas.

In view of these circumstances, we have positioned climate change coupled with plastic waste problems as especially important social challenges, and moved ahead with our carbon neutral strategy, biomass strategy, recycling strategy, and our initiatives to address the plastic waste problem. These strategies and initiatives help drive the recycling of resources, which we believe are aimed at realizing a transition from conventional linear economic activities, based on the premise of mass consumption and disposal of resources, to a circular economy, which allows for greater environmental and social sustainability. The Mitsui Chemicals Group contributes to solving social challenges by bolstering circular economy initiatives.

*The Mitsui Chemicals Group has identified "Circular Economy" as one of its material topics. Please see here for details.

We have appointed the officer in charge of the Corporate Sustainability Committee to take charge of addressing climate change and plastic waste problems as ESG-related problems mentioned in the SDGs. The committee reviews Group-wide policies, strategies, and plans. The results of the Committee’s discussions and activities conducted are reported to the Management Committee. In addition, particularly important matters are determined and supervised by the Board of Directors after deliberation at the Company-wide Strategy Committee and the Management Committee. Furthermore, to bolster circular economy initiatives, we have established the Circular Economy Center of Excellence (CoE) as a subcommittee under the Corporate Sustainability Committee. The Circular Economy CoE comprises the Steering Committee and three working groups on biomass, recycling, and climate change. The CTO serves as the supervisor, and the Green Sustainable Chemicals Division serves as its secretariat. Through participation in each working group by related departments and information sharing and discussion, it is working to efficiently promote both projects run individually by departments and the cross-organizational projects. The content of discussions conducted by the Steering Committee are reported to the Corporate Sustainability Committee. Moreover, the policies discussed at the Steering Committee are fed back to working groups to ensure consistency with the Group-wide strategy.

The Mitsui Chemicals Group is committed to addressing “climate change” and “circular economy” as our material topics. We quantitatively evaluate and analyze the business impacts of climate change and the circular economy in terms of both risks and opportunities, reflecting them in our medium- and long-term business strategies.

We identify risks and opportunities on a Group-wide basis under our risk management system. In FY2023, climate change and natural capital were designated as key Group-wide risks. We ensure the implementation of the PDCA cycle within our business plan system to address these key risks effectively.

To accelerate the promotion of various strategies towards a circular economy, we introduced internal carbon pricing (ICP) in FY2019. By adding IRR (c-IRR), which takes ICP into account as a factor in decision-making for large-scale investments, we have a system that discusses the necessity of investments not only from an economic standpoint but also from the perspective of reducing environmental impact. In FY2022, we revised the internal carbon price from 3,000 yen/t-CO₂e to 15,000 yen/t-CO₂e. This system supports the consideration of lower-carbon investments from the planning stage of investment projects.