How Canon is Embracing Circularity in Printer Manufacturing

"Being a Japanese company, we've got a corporate philosophy called kyosei," says Peter Bragg, EMEA Sustainability and Government Affairs Director at Canon.
"This means living and working together for the common good."
"It's a lovely umbrella term that has been around since the early 80s and it nicely encapsulates sustainability for us," he explains.
Kyosei is the philosophy that is driving Canon's focus on circularity in manufacturing, the latest manifestation of which is Canon's commitment to using recycled steel in its products.
From 2025 onwards, Canon plans to use electric furnace steel sheets in its range of printing products, including its multifunction devices (MFDs), home inkjet printers, large-format inkjet printers and commercial printing presses.
The company plans to expand the initiative gradually, increasing the number of products manufactured with these recycled materials.
Electric furnace steel sheets are made by melting steel scrap in an electric furnace, reducing reliance on new raw materials and promoting resource recycling.
The process is also significantly less carbon-intensive than traditional steelmaking methods.
Canon has studied the properties of these sheets and refined its processing techniques to ensure they meet the technical requirements of its products.
How to cut emissions in steel production
One of the key environmental benefits of electric furnace steel is its lower carbon footprint compared to conventional blast furnace steel.
The latter is produced from iron ore in a highly energy-intensive process, whereas electric furnace steel is created from scrap metal, requiring only a fraction of the energy.
Canon states that CO₂ emissions from the production of electric furnace steel sheets are approximately one-fifth of those generated by blast furnace steel sheets.
After plastic, steel is the most widely used material in Canon's printing products.
With its new approach, the company aims to make steel use more sustainable by incorporating recycled material and optimising its separation and processing techniques.
Closing the loop on steel recycling
Beyond using recycled steel in its own products, Canon is also contributing to the steel supply chain by refining and reselling scrap metal from its used MFDs.
Between April 2020 and March 2024, Canon Ecology Industry provided over 5,000 tonnes of refined steel scrap to Tokyo Steel.
In return, Canon will utilise electric furnace steel sheets produced by Tokyo Steel in the manufacturing of new printing products.
This closed-loop approach ensures that steel extracted from Canon's devices is reprocessed and reused within the industry.
Steel isn't the only thing to which Canon is applying its principles of circularity - the company has seen extremely positive results from plastic recycling too.
"The 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," Peter explains.
"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."
With recycled steel added to the equation, Canon printers may soon be a very circular affair.
Canon's progress on recycling targets
Canon has set ambitious targets to increase its use of recycled materials.
The company's resource recycling rate, which measures the proportion of recycled materials and components used in its printing business by weight, was around 16% in 2022. Canon aims to raise this figure to 20% by 2025 and 50% by 2030.
To achieve these goals, Canon has been improving the sorting accuracy of recycled resources, increasing the reuse rate of parts in MFDs and expanding the range of internally recycled materials.
By 2023, these efforts had lifted the resource recycling rate to approximately 17%.
Canon's commitment to net zero
Canon’s recycling initiatives form part of a broader strategy to reduce its environmental impact. Since 2008, the company has worked towards an annual 3% improvement in lifecycle CO₂ emissions per product.
Over the 15-year period from 2008 to 2023, Canon achieved an annual average reduction of 3.95%, culminating in a cumulative improvement of 44.4%.
By both integrating electric furnace steel sheets into its products and refining scrap steel for reuse, the company is advancing its sustainability commitments while reducing its carbon footprint.
Whilst 100% circularity isn't always possible, Canon is committed to reusing and recycling as much as physically possible.
"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," Peter says.
"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."
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