Every year on April 22, we commemorate Earth Day. It is a day we think about the Earth on which we live. This event, which aims to protect the global environment and pass it on to future generations, began in the United States in 1970 and is now said to involve billions of people in over 190 countries and regions.

The Sony Group is engaged in diverse businesses based on our Purpose to "fill the world with emotion, through the power of creativity and technology." Our ability to continue these activities is based on the existence of a healthy global environment.

At Sony, each of our businesses is taking action for sustainability, leveraging its own unique characteristics. Furthermore, we have newly established "Sony's Sustainability Vision" to even more clearly define the direction in which the overall Sony Group aims to proceed. Our goal is to "inspire a world filled with emotion (Kando) for this generation and beyond," and we believe that in order to have people connected to each other through emotion, it is necessary to create a society in which everyone can live with peace of mind in a healthy natural environment.

The theme of this year's Earth Day is 'Planet vs. Plastics,' and it is a call to phase out all single use plastics.

Plastics are used in every aspect of our daily lives and enrich our lifestyles. However, in order to pass on a sustainable society and global environment to future generations, we must promote efforts to achieve a circular economy, through initiatives such as reducing plastic usage, reusing and repairing products to extend their lifecycles, recycling these materials and enabling plastics to be used as resources, and substituting them with renewable resources.

Sony has been engaged in various environmental activities since the 1970s. In 2010, we launched the "Road to Zero" long-term environmental plan that aims to reduce our environmental footprint to zero by 2050. One of our medium-term environmental targets that we aim to achieve by fiscal 2025 is to completely eliminate plastic packaging of newly-designed small products, and we are making steady progress toward this target.

Sony has achieved zero plastic usage in individual product packaging (Packaging for products such as the WH-1000XM5 wireless headphones and flagship Xperia 1 V smartphone uses Original Blended Material, a paper material developed by Sony using plants with a short growth cycle and recycled paper as raw materials)

New SIE products released in FY2023 such as PlayStation Portal™ Remote Player and Access™ controller use 95-100% fibre-based packaging solutions (by weight), depending on the product*

In order to strive for a sustainable society, the understanding and commitment of each individual employee is essential. In 2019, we launched the "One Blue Ocean Project" to contribute to addressing marine plastic pollution, which promotes efforts such as reducing plastic usage globally. In addition to reducing the amount of plastic used in our business activities, we are expanding the cleanup activities in rivers, coastlines, and local communities that have been carried out by employees at Sony Group companies and our business sites around the world, and are proactively communicating with and raising awareness among our employees on these issues. In fiscal 2022, 7,847 employees and their families participated in cleanup activities at 44 business sites and collected approximately 13 tons of trash.

We will continue to explore how we can contribute to protecting the global environment, and pursue our vision of "inspiring a world filled with emotion for this generation and beyond."

Kenichiro Yoshida
Chairman and CEO, Sony Group Corporation

*New products released in FY2023 (percentage of fiber-based packaging by weight) include: PS5™ Console Covers (model group - slim) (95%), PlayStation Link™ USB adapter (100%), PULSE Elite™ wireless headset (99.8%), PULSE Explore™ wireless earbuds (100%), PlayStation Portal™ Remote Player (99.6%), Access™ controller (99%), Disc Drive For PS5® Digital Edition Consoles (98%), Vertical Stand for PS5® Consoles (98%), PlayStation®5 Console (model group - slim) (98%) and PlayStation®5 Digital Edition Console (model group - slim) (97%). Packaging weight data for calculations based on models sold in Europe.