Interview with Jean-Louis Grégoire and Walter Tobé, Canon Europe

In this Enterprise 2020 interview, Jean-Louis Grégoire, Vice President EMEA & Chief Corporate Strategy and Walter Tobé, European Environment Manager at Canon Europe, discuss how sustainability and recycling underpin Canon's business operations as well as its corporate philosophy.

The interview with Jean-Louis Grégoire and Walter Tobé is the sixth in a series of interviews on the future of responsible enterprise with business leaders from CSR Europe's member companies.

You can watch a video of the interview or read the summary below.

Interview with Jean-Louis Grégoire, Canon Europe

What is Canon's approach to sustainability that you foresee in the years to come?

That is a very important question. Today Canon spends between 9 and 10% of its total revenue in R&D and technological innovation. Part of that is dedicated to environmental and product safety activities.

Canon's vision is under the name of Kyosei, which means living together for the common good. I think it is very important that this philosophy is part of Canon's environmental vision. This vision, the way we see how the market is moving, is that we're moving more and more towards a recycling society.  

If I can give an expression, I would use a closed loop. We are producing, selling and are recycling the product so that at each stage of the lifecycle of the products, we can make sure that Canon considers how these products at the later stage will be reused under a different way.

In terms of your actual operations, are there ways that you're looking to reduce your environmental impact as well? 

Yes. Let me give you a very concrete example how Canon is working today. With our procurement department, we have designed guidelines to ensure that our premises are now complying and are more and more eco-friendly. Another example is about logistics. We are increasingly looking after logistics and we have moved away from roads. With the exception of three countries, all our goods are carried through by sea or by rail.

Interview with Walter Tobé, Canon Europe

When it comes to recycling, I think there are three elements that we have to take into consideration.  First of all, at the design of our products we have to build in recyclability so that elements in the product can be taken off the product and be reused or recycled later on in its lifetime. Just designing them for recyclability is not enough. You also have to really recycle them.

Thirdly, recycling only works if we, as a manufacturer, include recycled materials in our products because that closes the loop. We believe we move to a recycling society, and these are all processes we take into account in our operations and in our product design.

This is a laser toner cartridge of which we sell many all across Europe. We have a fully automated recycling plant for these kinds of cartridges in France. In this plant, 100% of the materials in this cartridge are reused. The plastic cover is shredded and then pelletized and used for new cartridges. The metal pieces are recycled externally. Inside these cartridges there are a couple of rollers that we can use straight away in new cartridges. This is, I think, a very good example of how we practice recycling in our operations.  

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Interview by Celia Moore
Edited by Daniel Morrison