Mazda is working across its entire supply chain to reduce the use of environmentally hazardous materials such as lead, mercury, cadmium, and hexavalent chromium. Using the standardized IMDS*1 international system, the Company gathers information on the materials from suppliers.
- *1International Material Data System
- To ensure that suppliers enter IMDS data appropriately, the Company publishes and distributes guidelines each year.
- The data gathered through IMDS is used to calculate the Company's vehicle recycling rate and to comply with various regulatory regimes for chemical materials, such as REACH in Europe.
Mazda is striving to eliminate the use of lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium, and cadmium. As a result of these efforts, by February 2007 the Company had met all of the independent targets established by the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, Inc. (JAMA) ahead of schedule.
Mazda is working to reduce the amount of CFC alternatives, which are greenhouse gases, as car air-conditioner refrigerants. The Company is also proceeding with development and adoption of air conditioners that use novel refrigerants in place of CFC alternatives.
To maintain a comfortable cabin environment, Mazda is committed to reducing VOCs*2 such as formaldehyde, toluene, and xylene, which have been implicated as possible causes of sick building syndrome.
- In 1999 Mazda developed a deodorizing filter with the capacity to remove aldehydes (adopted as either standard or optional in its core vehicle models).
- In new models, starting with the Mazda Demio/Mazda2 launched in 2007, Mazda reduced VOCs in the main materials used in the cabin, such as plastics, paints, and adhesives, thereby conforming with the indoor aerial concentration guidelines established by Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.
One of the targets of Mazda Green Plan 2010 is "the reduction of emissions of VOCs by body-painting lines to 30 g/m² of vehicle body paint or less by FY2010." The Company continued to make steady progress toward achieving this goal.
Mazda completed introduction of the Three Layer Wet Paint System in all plants by FY2005. Building on this, in FY2010 Mazda finished developing and introduced the Aqua-Tech Paint System, which both achieved VOC and CO2 emission reductions and enabled the Company to reach its goal of reducing VOC emissions in body-painting lines to 29.8 g/m² of vehicle body paint.
- *2 Volatile organic compounds
