Climate action measures
Our commitment: Reaching carbon zero by 2040Today completely emission-free products cannot exist. That’s why we focus on reducing our carbon footprint as much as we can. We continuously challenge our processes and strive to develop products that require less water, less energy, and less transportation. During this journey we continuously calculate our CO2 emissions, reduce them where possible and offset unavoidable ones by supporting climate action projects. Achieving carbon neutrality is not an end goal but an important bridge to more-substantial reductions on the path to reaching carbon zero by 2040.
What is our sustainability strategy?Reducing CO2 emissions is at the heart of our environmental efforts– and we challenge the way we do things every day to reach our global goal of carbon zero by 2040 and to become carbon negative by 2050.
Today by switching to renewable energy and lowering our consumption, reducing our packaging, and increasing its recyclability - in the future by developing technology that enables CO2 to be used as a raw material – everyone at Kao is working every day towards our zero emissions goal. In the meantime, we offset what we cannot eliminate yet.
What have we achieved so far?All Europe and US-operated factories and owned offices are using 100% renewable electricity (in Europe since 2014 and in the US since 2019).
In US and Austria, we even generate our own solar energy, which we aim to expand at every opportunity. Following our energy reduction plan, we have already reduced our yearly energy consumption by 31% (1) and 14% (2), our water consumption by 16% (1) and 23% (2), and our wastewater volume by 12% (1) and 19% (2) since 2016. On top, in 2015 we fully switched to using paper from sustainable sources (FSC, SFI).
(1): EMEA
(2): Americas
What is next?2025 is our next milestone. Until then we plan to further reduce our carbon footprint by 55% (3). In Europe we aim to further cut our energy consumption by 40% (4) and our water consumption by 23% (4), change to alternative heating technologies, and switch to a low-energy, cold mixing process. In the US, we plan to use wastewater filtration technology to produce energy from the filtration output by 2024 and to further reduce our water usage in production. We also aim for our factories to be zero waste, in Europe by 2025, and in the US by 2030.
(3): Scope 1+2, vs 2017
(4): relative to 2010