Basic approach and policy

Our Group considers the effective use of water resources as an important business issue and has set a target for the amount of water used and is working to ensure the effective use of water resources.

Governance and risk management

For more details, please refer to “Environmental Management”.

Strategies

Reduction of water usage

Our Group uses water in our manufacturing processes, as well as for cooling and cleaning.
At five of the ten sites that require water management plans, including both domestic and overseas sites, we are promoting the plan and are striving to ensure the effective use of water resources. We are striving to reduce water usage by improving our manufacturing methods to decrease the use of cooling water, optimizing cleaning methods, and installing cooling water recycling equipment. The Production Division in Japan, which uses a particularly high amount of water, reports monthly to the Environment and Safety Committee on the reasons for increases or decreases, as well as the reduction measures implemented. In FY2025, the use increased by 2.1% year-on-year.

Wastewater treatment

Since we installed a wastewater treatment system at the Fukaya Facility in 1969, we have been installing and upgrading wastewater treatment facilities in our production facilities using various water purification technologies, such as the activated sludge method, dissolved air floatation method, anaerobic method, coagulation and sedimentation method, and the membrane filtration method.
Wastewater from production facilities is treated through a tertiary treatment process. Wastewater from the R&D Center is treated until the secondary treatment process before being discharged to the sewer system. We comply with wastewater standards in terms of regulation values, etc., as prescribed in the Water Pollution Control Law, prefectural ordinances, and agreements with communities.

Wastewater treatment equipment (Itakura Facility)

Water stress analysis

In addition to addressing climate change, our Group is working to establish a system for managing water risk strategies and initiatives through the company-wide Environment and Safety Committee, in response to the growing global interest in and importance of water resources.
We analyze water stress using the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the WWF’s Water Risk Filter. We recognize that water risk is not high in our production areas in Japan; however, four sites in our U.S. and China production areas have been identified as being under high water stress. For example, at our sites in China, where water stress is high, we have set a target of keeping water consumption per unit of production below the five-year average. To achieve this, we are focusing on measures such as increasing continuous production and reducing the frequency of equipment washing.
We recognize that water is a vital global resource and that strengthening water management is essential. We will continue to address this issue appropriately and reduce water usage while monitoring the progress of our measures for achieving our reduction targets.

Indicators and targets

In FY2025, our water usage per unit of production increased by 6.8% year-on-year, falling short of our target of 1.7% reduction. As part of our efforts to reduce the usage, we implemented batch production to reduce the number of cleaning cycles. However, changes in our product mix had a significant impact.
For more details, please refer to the T.HASEGAWA Group ESG Data Book (PDF).