Biodiversity Dependencies and Impact Assessment

Within the corporate activities of the Ricoh Group, we evaluated the manufacturing of imaging devices, including multifunctional printers, as well as their consumables, such as toner and thermal paper, assuming that these have significant dependencies and impacts related to nature. Furthermore, we also evaluated the manufacturing of paper, an essential material commonly used in our devices. We utilized "ENCORE*1" to discover our connections with nature. The evaluation results are shown in Table 1. Next, based on the results, we mapped the locations of imaging device and thermal paper manufacturing sites along with the conditions of water resources and biodiversity in those locations, and identified priority areas. For water resources, we used "Aqueduct*2," and for biodiversity, we used "IBAT^*3."

Table1 Extracting Points of Contact with Nature in the Major Businesses of the Ricoh Group

*1: A tool for identifying nature-related risks developed primarily by the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre

*2: An assessment tool for water-related risks developed by the World Resources Institute.

*3: An assessment tool for biodiversity-related risks developed primarily by the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre.

To understand the severity of impacts through the value chain regarding selected representative imaging equipment and thermal paper products used in Japan, we identified parts of dependencies and impacts related to nature and evaluated impacts on biodiversity using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
The assessment was conducted using the Life Cycle Impact Assessment method LIME^*4.
For imaging equipment, results showed that more than 60% of the burden is attributable to printing paper (Figure 1). Consequently, evaluations excluding the impact of printing paper provide impact category-specific results for biodiversity and value chain-specific evaluations (Table 2). It was found that the impact on climate change is significant, with sourcing of raw materials particularly impactful. Furthermore, it was noted that impacts on water, soil, and air pollution, for which biodiversity assessments cannot be conducted, are primarily influenced by the sourcing of raw materials.
Similar assessments were conducted for thermal paper (Table 3), revealing significant impacts from climate change and consumption of forest resources, particularly influenced by the sourcing of raw materials in the value chain. These impacts are mainly attributed to the paper materials used as substrates and release papers.

Figure 1: Impact on Biodiversity through the Value Chain of Imaging Equipment

The amount of printing paper used was estimated based on the standard lifetime usage of the products under evaluation, taking into account duplex printing and printing multiple pages on a single sheet of paper.

Table 2 Environmental impact of imaging equipment (excluding printing paper) by stage of the value chain

Figures are percentages of contribution to biodiversity as calculated by LIME.

Table 3 Environmental impact of thermal paper by stage of the value chain

Figures are percentages of contribution to biodiversity as calculated by LIME.

Numerical values are percentages of contributions in individual impact areas.

*4 Items that were not extracted as Dependencies or Impacts in the evaluation using ENCORE, or those with a low degree of Dependencies or Impacts are marked with "-".
AIST-IDEA Ver. 3.4 was used as the inventory database.