100 Stories2006 Eco-Products Exhibition, Addressing Environmental Issues

Recently, environmental issues have been posing a great challenge to humanity. Environmental awareness is rising worldwide—the General Assembly of the United Nations announced that the ten years from 2021 until 2030 are the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and President Biden of the U.S. is promoting decarbonization.

Every country, region, and company has to make an effort, and major companies especially play a big role. Asahi Kasei has long been putting effort into solving environmental issues and implementing various solutions in every business and product. In addition, Asahi Kasei has been participating in the Eco-Products Exhibition since 2006, Japan’s biggest environmental exhibition organized by the Nikkei Inc.

The Eco-Products Exhibition is an event where participants—including Japan’s leading companies in the field of power, automobiles, and energy chemistry, local governments, NPOs, and NGOs—gather from around Japan. It is a major exhibition that more than 150,000 people attend annually, and about 5000 people visit Asahi Kasei’s booth every year. At first, each branch company participated separately, but since 2006, all the group companies have been presenting initiatives and products that address environmental issues as the Asahi Kasei Group.

Each division displays its work separately and uses creative methods, prepares thoroughly, and performs demonstrations to make it as easy to understand and interesting as possible for the general visitors. Among the booths of the approximately 700 companies that line up, Asahi Kasei’s booth gathers a lot of attention every year and it is all thanks to the creativity of its employees.

The employees of the building material business who participated the first time in 2006 express their impressions as follows.
“At the time, Asahi Kasei was mostly known for Hebel Haus™ and Saran Wrap™. Not many people knew about The Neoma™ foam, the heat-insulating material I was presenting, so I struggled to find ways to get people interested in it.”

Indeed, simply introducing it as “Neoma™ foam, a heat-insulating material” would not sound interesting to the general public. Therefore, a corner was established to have visitors try out the cooler box, Neoma™ carry, so that they can experience the heat-insulating effect first-hand.

Moreover, the Eco-Products Exhibition is also used as an out-of-school learning space for elementary and middle school students. Many schools also come on educational field trips. In 2008, over 20,000 students attended this event.

“In the presentation on the first day, I was surprised to see that the children were not interacting at all. Right the next day, we changed the way we performed our experiments and added factors that would encourage the children to engage more, such as quizzes. Handling the situation flexibly and improving the content makes the children way more interactive. This was a good lesson for us. It taught us that the way of presenting products is an important aspect in business in general.”

Since then, the concept of creating content that children and adults can enjoy alike has been passed down in the company, making difficult themes, such as the film that creates clean water, a great success.

Currently, many people recognize Asahi Kasei as an environmentally-friendly company. The concept of creating content that children and adults can enjoy alike and anyone can learn from is not only utilized in the Eco-Products Exhibition but is also currently implemented in many presentations.