PLANET-CONSCIOUS PROJECTION
If, like us, you despair at the greed of the corporate world and the way that businesses are defined solely by making profit for their shareholders, well, Epson in Japan seems to have defined a better path. It has been aggressive in its pursuit of eco-friendly design and recycling for all its products since far back before eco-friendliness became a potential way to promote your products to greenies, and the company maintains what it calls a “commitment to the development of a sustainable society”. This goes beyond the greenery of material sourcing, recycling and non-pollution to company behaviour as a whole, respect for human rights, workers’ conditions (it recently started manufacturing face masks for employees), and corporate responsibility. Epson’s mantra is that it is “looking hard at solutions to social issues, understanding the expectations of society, and then providing products and services that far exceed those expectations.” That a company can manage all these expectations while still innovating technically to deliver products of the quality we regularly enjoy from Epson, and thereby achieving annual global sales of US$10 billion+, it almost gives you hope for the world.
As a result, Epson was recently announced as included in the FTSE4Good Index Series for a 15th consecutive year. The FTSE4Good Index Series measures the performance of companies demonstrating strong environmental, social and governance practices — it’s widely used by investment funds to identify responsible companies. And since the Japanese part of the index wasn’t published until 2004, that’s an appearance every year of the Index’s existence. The company also carries a Gold rating by independent assessors EcoVadis for the third year in succession for being “Outstanding” in sustainable procurement, labour and human rights, and for its actions to preserve the environment.
So if you’re after a product which, as much as one is able to judge, will do less harm in many ways, you should feel safe with Epson.