Japan Chemical Industry Association

 

 

 

As an essential industry that provides society with stable supplies of needed products, the chemical industry is expected not only to respond to social and economic issues but also to meet society's expectations as a solution provider that contributes to achieving carbon neutrality and other aspects of Green Transformation (GX) and as a driving force in the creation of new environmental value.

Accordingly, the Japan Chemical Industry Association (JCIA) will be pursuing activities in line with three key themes: pursuing GX initiatives, promoting international cooperation, and steadily implementing safety and chemical product management initiatives.

 

(1) Pursuing GX initiatives
With various GX initiatives already underway at Japanese chemical companies, we will be keeping a close watch on government activities and global trends in related fields. We will also be working with the government in formulating a roadmap to carbon neutrality by 2050 based on leveraging technological developments in support of carbon neutrality and promoting recycling economies.
Realizing carbon-neutral, recycling-oriented societies will be costly, requiring a considerable amount of capital investment and conversion of raw materials and fuels as well as cooperation throughout supply chains and system designs that support these efforts. Above all, it is vital to foster societies, inclusive of general consumers as the final users of products, that are broadly accepting of “environmental value”, i.e., the environmental added-value of products.
To help enhance understanding of this environmental value, JCIA will be promoting the "visualization" of carbon footprints (CFP), enabling quantitative evaluation of GHG emissions and their contributions to environmental impacts through use of the calculation guidelines compiled by the chemical industry. We will also be testing a registration system of recycled chemical materials to improve public recognition of recycled products and achieve recycling of chemical products as soon as possible, hoping through these efforts to communicate to society the importance and benefits of the chemical industry.

 

(2) Promoting international cooperation
As challenges common to the Japanese and global chemical industries emerge amidst efforts to achieve sustainable societies, further international cooperation must be pursued to resolve these issues.
We will be working toward the creation of an international framework for chemical product activities of the International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA).
We will also continue soliciting the opinions of our member companies and organizations and actively communicating these views when teaming up with the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) to develop a legally binding international treaty on ending plastic pollution and when working on concrete action plans for the chemical industry to establish a chemical product management system based on the Global Framework on Chemicals (GFC).

 

(3) Steadily implementing safety and chemical product management initiatives
Needless to say, safety and chemical product management initiatives are fundamental and prerequisite for the survival of the chemical industry, which is responsible for ensuring that society enjoys a steady supply of chemical products indispensable to our daily lives.
Among the security- and disaster-related challenges facing the chemical industry are aging facilities and labor shortages stemming from a declining birthrate and a growing proportion of elderly people, and we will support the introduction of smart security by developing systems that make full use of digital technologies and by assisting in training the human resources needed to sustain such systems.
We will continue our ongoing logistics safety efforts, such as keeping abreast of international regulations regarding the transport of hazardous materials, and we will be working to ensure that the "Voluntary Action Plan for Optimizing and Improving the Productivity of Chemical Logistics" we formulated at the end of FY2023 becomes more widely known and instilled.
Regarding chemical product management, we will persist in our efforts to broaden the appeal of risk-based chemical product management integrated with supply chains to provide safe and secure chemical products.

 

With these three initiatives at the core of our efforts, we remain sincerely committed to the sustainable development of our association and the chemical industry in Japan.