Canon Q&A: How to Build a Circular Business

Raw material use and waste are two of the biggest problems plaguing the planet.

Each year, more than 400 million tonnes of new plastic are produced and only 15% of this is collected for recycling. 

Canon is looking to make a change by integrating circularity into its business strategy.

Peter Bragg leads Canon’s sustainability strategy across Europe, the Middle East and Asia (EMEA) as the company’s EMEA Sustainability and Government Affairs Director. 

He shares his expertise on circularity with Sustainability Magazine.

How does Canon approach circularity?

If I start at the top, we've got a corporate philosophy, being a Japanese company, called ‘kyosei’. This means living and working together for the common good.

It's a lovely umbrella that has been around since the early 80s and it nicely encapsulates sustainability for us. 

We break our strategy down in fairly traditional ways, like an ESG approach. Under the sustainability pillar, our two key impact areas are reducing carbon emissions circularity. That's been really a key focus for some time for us. 

Really it's about extending the life of our devices, making them last as long as possible, but also looking at recycling opportunities. We have a zero waste to landfill policy and we've really embraced remanufacturing, especially on our B2B side. 

That remanufacturing process enables us to create what we call ‘as new devices’ that reuse up to 90% of components and materials from the previous device. We're seeing really positive demand for that and we also provide closed loop cartridge recycling.

We also see the proportion of recycled plastic in our products increasing over time. Our latest office device, a multifunction printer, now contains about 30% recycled plastic. 

It's become embedded within our overall product development process, in R&D and the way we approach what we design, manufacture and look through the entire product lifecycle.

Why is circularity important to Canon’s strategy?

It’s important on a number of levels. One is our overall approach to sustainability because it’s the right thing to do.

We're all recognising resource constraints and the importance of not only keeping those devices around longer — avoiding unnecessary waste — but also the availability of those raw materials. 

The two elements of our sustainability pillar are completely interlinked as well.

We have an overall goal of achieving net zero by 2050. We've got near term 2030 goals around our Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.

We're also on track to reduce the CO₂ emissions of our products by 50% by 2030 based on 2008 levels.

Last year, we set another goal to achieve a 50% resource recycling rate for all materials in our digital printing devices. Circularity is critical to meeting those goals. 

It's about our business model as well. Traditionally you might've thought that you’re just taking away demand for a brand new product. But actually, we see it very much as growing the overall market as we're seeing increasing demand year on year for high quality remanufactured devices. 

It's about recognising that there's no compromise on quality and that you’re getting a very effective device that will meet all of your printing needs, but you can do that and deliver on your sustainability goals and requirements. 

How is circularity shaping Canon's business strategy?

Sustainability is really now an integral part of our strategy. Certainly on the B2B side, it’s absolutely critical now to our success as a business and our ability to compete against other key manufacturers. 

Our key remanufactured office devices are part of the ES series, meaning environmental series. We’re focussed on gradually, over time, trying to increase the range of products in that range.

In the last 12 months or so, we've started selling refurbished cameras on our e-commerce sites as well and the demand for those has been fantastic. 

We're seeing that demand grow across different product ranges and obviously we don't just do printers. There are cameras, lenses — so there's a huge opportunity there that we want to be a part of. 

We do our remanufacturing centrally as it requires a higher level of production quality, but refurbishment we do locally. It's a bit like going to a car dealership and buying a vehicle, but you are getting that full warranty and guarantee and the 150-point check that they advertise.

What advice would you give to other businesses looking to contribute to circularity? 

My first piece of advice is to embrace responsibility. Look at your impact across the whole product cycle.

It does go all the way through R&D, into design, the manufacturing process and all the way through use.

Focus on extending the lifetime and then looking at second life and beyond, then find the end of life. Making that as circular as possible can be challenging. 

I’ll happily put my hands up and say that most of our new manufacturing is over in Japan and is Asia based.

Reaching full circularity on every single product is probably not realistic and wouldn't make any sense economically or sustainably, but it's about looking for all those opportunities where you can take responsibility for your product.

That can mean ensuring the quality of the product, that it lasts and not having any built in obsolescence. 

And then it's about going beyond recycling. As we're seeing demand for remanufactured refurbished products, it shows that people are really interested in buying those things.

Recycling is still important — eventually everything comes to an end of life and you need to be very clear on what happens to make sure that things are dealt with responsibly and meet all legal requirements.

Look for other opportunities as well. At Canon USA, they found a route to put used print toner — not the cartridges but the toner itself — into tarmac on roads.

It's about looking for innovation because there's always innovation out there.

Finally, you don't have to do everything at once. Look for smaller opportunities.

It might be a single product in a whole product line, but start small and think big. You can always expand in time.

We've been remanufacturing devices since the 90s. These things take a lot of time to set up and establish, but keep persevering.

The market is out there and I think that demand will only increase over time.

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