Climate change and climate mitigation

Cutting air pollution in the office and in the outside world

Air pollution affects both the external environment and the internal working environment. We're committed to avoiding and reducing greenhouse gas emissions to help improve air quality, reduce pollution and create more sustainable workplaces.

We aim to cut pollution and reduce particle emissions as far as possible during:

• Printing device operation, by installing filter devices to reduce particle emissions
• Transportation, by favouring logistics and transport that have a lower environmental impact

We're striving to reduce particle emissions

Indoor air quality (IAQ) is an important factor linked to better health and wellbeing. There's growing awareness of:

• The environmental risks arising from chemicals, such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by construction materials, cleaning products and office equipment
• The health impacts of fine particulates, which can present challenges to people with allergies or other health conditions that increase sensitivity to dust and particulates

As part of our commitment to improving our customers’ individual work environments, Konica Minolta has developed effective solutions to help our customers optimise IAQ and create a workplace that's better for everyone's health, comfort and productivity.

Although laser printers may be only one of many sources of odours and emissions in the office environment, we aim to minimise their impact. We've developed dedicated, high-performance filter devices (or air cleaning units) for our office systems that simultaneously:

• Ensure high particle emission reduction
• Optimise airflow so that devices work efficiently and reliably

Our air cleaning units last the device lifetime and never need replacing. There are three options:

• Standard air cleaning unit, fitted as standard to the latest Konica Minolta devices, reducing emissions by at least 90%
• Optional air cleaning unit, attached to the outside of an office device, reducing emissions by 82%–97%
• External filter devices (if an air cleaning unit can't be attached to a device), reducing emissions by up to 98%

Find out more about Indoor air quality and our air cleaning units.

We're reducing our energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions

We've initiated a number of measures to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

Net Zero by 2050

In fiscal 2024, Konica Minolta began managing its CO₂ emissions reduction results based on leading-edge climate science with fiscal 2018 as the base year, with a view to updating to effective and ambitious targets along the 1.5 C emissions pathway to achieve the Paris Agreement. We aim to achieve net zero in Scope 1, 2 and 3 by 2050 compared to fiscal year 2018 across the value chain in accordance with SBTi Corporate Net Zero Standard.

All so far published results are measured against the previous base year 2005. In 2023, Konica Minolta recorded 748 thousand tonnes CO₂, which is a reduction of almost 64% compared to former 2005 base year (which recorded 2,067 thousand tonnes CO₂ emissions).

Our near term goal is to reduce our absolute Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions by 51% by FY2030 from a FY2018 base year in accordance with SBTi Corporate Net Zero Standard. Konica Minolta also commits to reduce absolute Scope 3 GHG emissions from purchased goods and services, upstream transportation and distribution, use of sold products and end-of-life treatment of sold products 30% within the same timeframe.

Raw materials and the manufacturing processes

All Konica Minolta factories are working under a certified ISO 14001 Environmental Management System. Additionally, Konica Minolta has developed an own factory certification system, which is applied to own and main supplier’s factories, managing among others, CO₂ emissions. From FY2005 to FY2023, we’ve reduced CO₂ emissions by 42% (or 163,000 tonnes CO₂).

AIRe Link for remote diagnostics

AIRe Link is a remote diagnostics tool that replaces physical visits. Using AIRe Link, we can support customers remotely to quickly identify and solve problems on their print devices. In 2023, the service has saved:

• More than 15,000 on-site customer visits across Europe
• Around 480,000 kilometres on the road
• 124 tonnes of travel-related greenhouse gas emissions

Find out more about AIRe Link.

Towards 100% renewable energy usage

We're a member of RE100, a global initiative that brings businesses together in a commitment to obtain 100% of their electricity from renewable energy sources.

• Our European headquarters and many subsidiaries already use 100% or nearly 100% green electricity (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Sweden).
• Three factories in Japan, China and Malaysia and our two toner factories in France and the U.S. use 100% renewable energy, which means that 45% of all office devices of our current fleet and 100% of our production printing devices sold in FY2023 for the European market (on a value basis) are produced with renewable energy.

We're empowering our customers with products and services reducing the environmental impact

To help our customers transform their printing operations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, offset those that can't be avoided, and transparently meet their own environmental reporting obligations, our products and solutions are designed to deliver low emissions throughout their lifecycle. For example:

• Products are made from fewer, more easily recyclable raw materials
• Products weigh less to reduce consumption and transport emissions and end-of-life disposal
• More economical toners (such as the Simitri® V range) help to reduce consumables and energy waste

These steps reflect our commitment to avoiding and reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the first instance.

Lower energy consumption and CO₂ emissions during printing

During printing, the largest energy consumption – over 60% – occurs when the toner is fixed to the paper. With our polymerised Simitri® V toner used in the bizhub i-series (our latest MFP generation) we've reduced the fixing temperature by about 15°C compared to previous models. Combined with a new fixing device, this helps to significantly reduce the MFPs' weekly TEC (typical energy consumption) value. The reduction in power consumption has resulted in our customers producing up to 25% (varies by model) less CO₂ emissions in operation compared to previous models.