"Lifestyle activities place a burden on the Earth." TaKaRa responds to this reality through its "green accounting" activities, seeing the reduction of the burdens caused by lifestyle activities, and a return of profits to society through environmental preservation and other social contributions, as corporate obligations accompanying business activities.

What's "Green Ink"? "Black ink" and "red ink" are measures of economic results, indicating the degree of the return made by a company upon the funds of its investors. But at the same time, businesses also receive "investments" from nature in the form of resources, energy, waste disposal sites, and so on. We asked what we could use as a measure of the return on this investment, and coined the term "green ink". "Green accounting" is a settlement of a business's contributions against the investment it receives from the Earth. Why measure things in ECO units? Under "green accounting" we evaluate the results of a wide range of environmental activities, under the comprehensive index called "ECO". The environmental burdens generated by businesses take many forms, such as energy consumption and waste discharge. It's hard to see the big picture looking at each of these data items one by one. But if a company expresses its environmental performance in a single number, its employees can readily evaluate that performance, feel closer to the issues, and take action. And releasing that number to the public makes it easier for society to observe our activities, which spurs us to more meaningful conservation activities. How are ECO calculated? The key is in the weights assigned to each environmental issue. Global warming, the waste problem, acid rain, and so on can not all be treated the same. Looking at environmental impacts, we have CO2 measured as t-c, electrical power as kwh, and waste discharges as t -- units that don't simply add up and offer an average! To line up these units, we first established a base year (initially set to fiscal 1997), allowing measurement of percentage improvements over that base. We then used methodology from LCA (life cyle assessment) impact evaluation, which assigns relative weights to individual environmental issues. Five environmental managers from within Takara and three researchers from outside the company weighed 11 environmental issues through discussions and questionnaires, ranking each on a 5-level scale indicating the importance of that issue to Takara Shuzo. The percentage changes in these 11 environmental measures are multiplied by their respective weights and averaged, with each percentage point of improvement in the average representing 1 ECO. Why are there two numbers? A company's contributions to the environment includes its efforts to reduce the environmental impacts resulting from corporate activities. This is activity to eliminate red ink (i.e., reduce a minus). This is our Environmental Impact Reduction Green Ink, and serves as a measure of our efficiency in making use of investments from the Earth. A company's contributions to the environment also include activities that make a positive contribution. A good example is activities that return a portion of profits to environmental conservation or other social contributions. A company makes profits on investments that include those from the Earth, and thus must return a dividend to the Earth, as it does to any investor. We call this Social Contribution Green Ink. The two numbers together point to different ways in which we should be contributing to the environment.

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