Endeavor to create a circular economy

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

To resolve these challenges, we believe that a transition is needed from a so-called linear economy of consuming resources and disposing of products to a circular economy in which renewable resources are used and other resources are utilized efficiently as well as collected for reuse to prevent waste. The Mitsui Chemicals Group will promote resource recycling through action on its carbon neutral strategy, biomass strategy, and recycling strategy, as well as through efforts to address the problem of marine plastic waste, contributing to the realization of a circular economy.

*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 decided and supervised by the Board of Directors after they are discussed at the Company-wide Strategy Committee and deliberated by the Management Committee.
Furthermore, we have established the Circular Economy Center of Excellence (CoE) under the Corporate Sustainability Committee. The Circular Economy CoE system consists of biomass, recycling, and climate change working groups, which are overseen by the steering committee where the CTO serves as the supervisor and the Green Chemicals Business Promotion Office as the 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 cross-organizational projects. The content of discussions conducted by the steering committee are reported to the Corporate Sustainability Committee. In addition, policies discussed at the steering committee are fed back to working groups, thus ensuring consistency with companywide 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 opportunities and risks, reflecting them in our medium and long-term business strategies.

We identify risks and opportunities on a company-wide basis under our risk management system. As for climate change measures, each division includes its short-, medium-, and long-term challenges, goals, and measures in its annual budget, and also adds measures for circular economy starting in 2022.

As one of the measures to accelerate the promotion of each strategy for realizing a circular economy, we updated our ICP from 3,000 yen/t-CO₂e to 15,000 yen/t-CO₂e in April 2022. 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.