Biotope created together with locals

Aisin Seiki opened Aisin Ecotopia in September 2007. A highly varied range of environmental facilities that provide the opportunity to study about the environment while gaining first-hand experience of nature are housed in a site extending over 10,000 square meters set inside our Handa plant in Aichi Prefecture. They include “Ecotope”, a biotope where visitors can come into contact with many different types of living creatures in the midst of nature; “Eco center”, a facility where waste products from the factory are recycled into resources; “Eco farm”, where compost made from organic waste is used to cultivate vegetables; and “Eco forest”, which contains trees that were transplanted without cutting them when the factory was built.

Ecotope is situated on an extensive site covering 2,800 square meters. 6,850 stakeholders, including employees, people from the local community, members of NPOs, civic group and primary school pupils cooperated to create this facility on a “hand-made” basis since 2006.

As the various plants began to grow and a true biotope environment came into being, so the place became a habitat for frogs, killifish, dragonflies, fireflies and all kinds of small animals. The environment then became frequently visited by pheasants and herons in search of prey, thus creating a vivid ecosystem.

A testing facility created in the image of the global environment of the future

Today, when the need for conservation of the global environment is being felt more acutely than ever, companies are expected to make every effort to reduce the burden that their business activities place on the environment.

Reducing waste emissions is one of the requirements. Ecotope also serves as a testing facility for the recycling and reuse of waste emitted from the factory. For instance, the crystal clear water that flows through the stream is in fact purified industrial effluent. Finely powdered bricks that were previously used as the wall of the aluminum melting furnace are reused in part of the soil.

Timber from forest thinning at Neba in Nagano Prefecture, which is upstream from a local river in Aichi, has been used for the monument, the bridge and the benches, while trees that had to be transplanted when the factory was expanded are used for forestation. Compost is obtained from leftovers and organic waste obtained from the canteen.

We have so far managed to reduce the amount of waste being emitted by 2,900 tons thanks to these efforts being made toward recycling and reuse at Ecotopia.

At Eco center, waste matter from each factory is rigorously sorted, broken down and returned to its original form as a single material. As well as striving to restore value to these materials, we are making constant efforts to reduce the actual quantity of waste products.

A place where the children in whose hands the future of the global environment lies can study

Companies are being required not just to reduce their activities of environmental concern but also to provide society with information that will prove useful for environmental conservation. By making the environmental technology and information they have acquired over the years available to society, they should be able to increase the public's environmental consciousness and bring about action.

AISIN is engaged in a variety of environmental communication activities, one of which involves educating children in local communities all over Japan. The “Aisin Environmental Study Program” involves lectures and talk sessions at local primary and junior high schools with the idea of conveying the knowledge needed for environmental conservation to the children to whom the future of the planet will be entrusted. In addition to such environmental education in the classroom, we provide all kinds of opportunities for study through hands-on experience of nature because of the importance we place on children being able to observe and come into contact with living things outside the classroom.

As a venue for the practical study of nature, Aisin Ecotopia has been open to local primary and junior high schools so that children are easily able to experience natural environments. During fiscal 2008, a total of 2,400 pupils observed marine animals in Ecotopes and dug up potatoes on Eco farms. We are considering a variety of projects to allow even more children and other members of local communities to visit Ecotopia.

We are making use of Aisin Ecotopia as a testing station for environmental technology and as a place where children can study the environment in order to explore the global environment of the future.