Manufacturing management strategies for environmental protection: toward the environmental upgrading of management and manufacturing systems to cope with environmental laws

Recent environmental problems have been caused by business activities and a lifestyle based on mass production, mass consumption and mass disposal. Th ese problems have also become global in scale. Increasingly, global efforts are being applied to preserve and improve the environment. NEC, a worldwide electronics manufacturer, created its own environment acti on plan called Eco-Action 21. This is a continuously evolving plan applied throughout the NEC group and subsidiaries. Globally, 34 NEC manufacturing s ites have received ISO 14001 certification, NEC Tohoku in Japan and NEC Ire land obtained BS 7750 certification even before this. NEC improves subcontr actors' environmental behaviour with our accumulated expertize and technolo gy derived from our ISO experience and our own development. Input for this paper was not only from NEC Tohoku and the NEC group, but also from outside NEC.