Canon Q&A: Carbon Reduction and Environmental Protection

Canon is continuing to strengthen its position as a global leader in imaging and technology, helping businesses and consumers to embrace innovation while advancing sustainability across its operations and value chain.

Headquartered in Japan, Canon operates through regional organisations worldwide, delivering products and services spanning imaging, printing, healthcare and industrial technologies.

Across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the company is also driving progress through remanufacturing, refurbishment, repair and circular economy initiatives that extend product lifecycles and reduce environmental impact.

As Director of Sustainability & Government Affairs for Canon EMEA, Peter Bragg leads the region’s sustainability strategy, overseeing environmental programmes, regulatory engagement and responsible business practices across sales, marketing, logistics and operational functions.

His role looks to strengthen the company's position as a global leader in imaging and technology, support customers and markets throughout EMEA, but also advance sustainability initiatives across service, refurbishment and remanufacturing activities, helping to embed circularity and long-term value creation throughout the business.

Drawing on extensive experience in sustainability leadership and stakeholder engagement, Peter works to ensure Canon’s regional activities align with the company’s global sustainability ambitions and corporate philosophy.

How is Canon embedding sustainability across the business?

I'd like to say we've embedded it; it's been in place for a long time. 

Within Canon, the umbrella that sustainability sits under is our Kyosei philosophy.

Kyosei means living and working together for the common good; it was coined in the mid-80s by Mr Kaku, who was the boss of Canon at the time. 

Canon, as an innovative company, always wanted to be a pioneer in some of these sustainability areas. 

In 1990, Canon was the first large corporate organisation to introduce a toner recycling programme. 

We have a sustainability committee that reports to the CEO and that drives everything throughout the group in terms of centrally driven targets and policies. 

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Canon recognises that, especially in the UK and Europe, we're a driving force on sustainability globally, whether it's regulation, corporate approach and everything else.

We have quite a lot of independence to set our own strategy and decide how we're going to not just meet those corporate targets but also deliver what we need to deliver. 

Although we're a technology company, communications is a strong part of what we need to do, so embedding sustainability within that has been really positive.

Our journey is like everyone's: very long. But I don't feel like I have to go around convincingly, telling the argument of why we need to do it [sustainability] and why it's important; we're a long way past that. 

Everyone recognises the importance of it, not just for us as a business, but as a corporate citizen.

Sustainability is one of the key reasons why we want people to shift to digital printing from some of the more traditional print methods.

We just achieved EcoVadis Platinum for the second year running, with 89%, so that puts us in the top 1%, with CDP A List on climate. 

We've just been awarded the CDP Supplier Engagement Leader award as well. All of these things help to support and reinforce that we have got sustainability well embedded across the business. 

The goalposts are moving all the time, and those of us who work in sustainability and closely to it know all of those external factors around why we do sustainability are still, in a way, becoming ever more pressing at the moment.

What is Canon doing to protect and conserve the environment?

As a manufacturing business at its heart and a technology business, we’re always thinking about reducing our climate impact. 

Circularity is always key. We're in the business of making products and we want those products to last as long as possible. 

We make high-quality products and we are proud of the fact that people have cameras in their drawers that still work after 20 years. It's amazing.

Despite this, we're still always moving forward in terms of technological development. 

We've got five global plants dedicated to remanufacturing and refurbishment activities, and one in Germany. 

About three or four years ago, Canon started the Task Force on Nature Related Financial Disclosures.

We also have the Canon Bird Branch Project, linking into the imaging technology that we have, like the cameras and binoculars.

We really wanted to push forward and start talking about the UN initiative of 30 by 30 and looking at taking more of a nature-positive approach within our region.

Two years ago, Canon first embarked on setting up a partnership with an organisation called Coral Spawning International (CSI) . 

We're working with CSI, a small but science-based organisation, to restore coral reefs in degraded areas by successfully developing technology that encourages sexual reproduction in coral to happen more frequently.

With the coral, you can modularise this in a shipping container; using light and certain environmental conditions, you can force the coral to spawn more frequently and then capture the coral, capture the eggs, grow and incubate baby coral that you can then plant out. 

They're also investigating cross-breeding coral with more resilient species.

We started supporting them a little bit over a year ago with imaging technology. Some of them are very high-powered macro lenses and have proven to be incredibly useful for their research. 

We've extended the partnership this year and we've developed a partnership with Nature Seychelles, which has been to fund one of these modular coral spawning labs to go out to Cousin Island in the Seychelles. 

As of November 2025, it had already produced 800,000 coral embryos from 14 colonies and evidence of approximately 65,000 new corals settling.

We also have a satellite part of the business and by using satellite technology, we can look at mapping things like deforestation.

What clean and efficient energy is being promoted and used?

Canon is increasing, year on year, the amount of renewable energy that it purchases. 

Currently in Europe, we're at approximately 72.2% renewable energy usage. 

Our manufacturing site in Giessen, Germany, is 100% renewable energy and we've just put a very large installation on the roof of that. 

Some of our large factories in Thailand and Vietnam are also now 100% renewable. 

The use of renewables is rolled up into our overall corporate climate targets and about reducing our Scope 1 and 2 emissions, which we have an SBTi target on.

In 2025, we recorded a 6.3% reduction in our Scope 1 and 2 emissions and a 19.4% reduction in our Scope 3 emissions.

We also look at emission reduction through our product lifecycle lens and reducing the CO₂ emissions per product unit.

Canon had more than 291GWh of renewable energy consumption globally last year and achieved a 5.4% reduction in energy consumption.

In 2025, 72.7% of electricity was sourced from renewable sources across EMEA. 

How is Canon reducing its greenhouse gases across all stages of the business?

There was a target set in about 2015 aiming for a 50% improvement in CO₂ emissions per product by 2030 based on a 2008 baseline. Last year we hit 45.5%.

Since 2012, Canon has had a 3% YoY reduction goal in place. In 2016, the annual report found that this progress could in fact be tracked back to 2008 (between 2008 and 2016 there was a 34% reduction).

Then, in the 2019 report, Canon identified that achieving a 3% average yearly reduction until 2030 would result in a 50% overall reduction, in line with the Paris Agreement.

To help meet that, we’ve looked at operational efficiencies in manufacturing, looking at everything from the materials used to reducing the energy demands of the devices themselves and extending the lifetime of the product as well.

Our latest office printer, imageFORCE, compared to the previous model, imageRUNNER, had a CO₂ reduction of 15%.

Year-on-year, we’re always looking at making improvements. 

Globally, Canon has the Minimum Energy 360 initiative that looks across every part of the business and looks at where we can save energy.

What implications do you think climate change could have specifically on Canon?

As a business, it's similar risks to other businesses: supply chain risks and operational issues. 

Canon has mapped all of its main sites, warehouses and factories to look at climate risks.

We recognise all of those issues could face us and affect our costs and supply chain risks. That's why circularity is seen as so important. 

The more we can improve the circularity of our products, the repairability and reuse, then that can help to minimise some of those longer-term risks. 

We can design and manufacture products that help our customers meet their climate goals. Then again, that's going to be beneficial for them and help them.

Customers want to know about the CO₂ emissions of our devices and what the energy demands are. 

Last year we released, using Raman spectroscopy, a plastic analyser that helps to identify black plastic, which is a sustainability problem in recycling streams because it can't be spotted in normal recycling streams. 

They've been researching and looking into new coatings for the perovskite solar cells, looking at improving the durability and the efficiency of those cells.

Climate change, I think Canon sees it as an opportunity, but recognises that to be successful in the future and to be able to operate in the future, sustainability has to remain a key part of what we do, both in terms of our products and our corporate approach.

We've just released Phase 7 of our Excellent Global Corporation Plan, which is our corporate plan for the next five years; deepening our approach to sustainability is one of those seven core pillars.

There's a lot of macroeconomic noise out there at the moment and some businesses and governments are pulling back on targets but for Canon, we still see that long-term approach is very much part of our business.