Environmental accounting at Ricoh

Since the mid-1980s, Ricoh has been positively tackling environmental conservation through its efforts to save energy, resource conservation and recycling, pollution prevention, and so on. Today, when the environmental conservation activity has spread throughout the entire business sphere, it is necessary to grasp the amount of investment in environmental conservation and the effect of the investment, reflect them in the allocation of management resources and the management of projects for conservation of the environment, and disclose the results of efforts made to conserve the environment. Ricoh introduced environmental accounting in fiscal 1998. Since then, Ricoh has been spreading environmental accounting among the member companies of the Ricoh Group. Basically, Ricoh considers environmental accounting as a management tool. Namely, the aim of the company's environmental accounting is to get an overall picture of the cost and effect of environmental conservation activity, make a detailed analysis of costs and effects not only on a company-wide scale (Corporate Environmental Accounting) but also at departmental levels (Segment Environmental Accounting), and use the analysis results in decision-making by management. The salient characteristics of Ricoh's environmental accounting are that the costs of environmental conservation are coded so that they can be calculated and grasped by the corporate accounting system, that the effects of environmental conservation activities are measured in terms of both the effect of environmental conservation (the amount of reduction of environmental impact) and the economic effect (the savings of expenditures, the increase in earnings, the avoidance of risk, etc.), and that the company's own index of environmental efficiency has been set. The basic concepts mentioned above have been largely incorporated in the "Developing an Environmental Accounting System" published by Japan's Ministry of the Environment in 2000.