NOT CURRENT YEAR

Grade D+
ChemScore report card 2021

Asahi Kasei

About the company

Headquartered in Tokyo, Asahi Kasei Corporation produces synthetic fibres, industrial chemicals, petrochemicals, plastics (resins), and synthetic rubber. Asahi Kasei also operates and sells real estate, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, electronics, construction materials, and consumer products.
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Total score
12 / 48

Grade summary

To our knowledge, there are no hazardous chemicals in Asahi Kasei’s product portfolio. However, the company is only awarded three points in the first category, due to the fact that there is no available data for the 85 percent of the company’s production that takes place outside of the EU and US. This low transparency is a big issue for investors, as it makes it hard to do a proper evaluation of the risks connected to the product portfolio. Other poor areas for Asahi Kasei is the Lack of Controversies category, where the Japanese company scores zero points due to several fatal accidents, and Management & Transparency, where the company earns a meager two points. It’s Asahi Kasei’s decent performance in the Development of Safer Chemicals category that saves it from being among ChemScore’s bottom ten.

Opportunities for improvement

  1. Asahi Kasei assesses its products in 8 sustainability categories including environmental pollution to name them “Environmental Contribution Products”. However we couldn’t identify safer and less-toxic alternatives easily on their website. We recommend to develop and market those.
  2. Asahi Kasei has developed two yarns that qualify for circularity points: Roica V550 and Roica EF yarns – one being a C2C certified circular fibre, and the other largely made from recycled internal scraps. Still, a clear circular strategy with relevant KPIs and SMART targets is lacking.
  3. We can only rank 15 percent of Asahi Kasei’s overall production, since the rest takes place outside the EU and US, where there are no reliable and publicly available sources for identifying producers of hazardous chemicals. Informing ChemSec about hazardous chemical production outside the EU and US could raise the company’s score considerably.

Category breakdown

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Product Portfolio
3 / 18

Asahi Kasei produces/uses no highly hazardous substances. However, much about the company’s product portfolio is unknown due to the its large production that takes place outside of the EU and US.

Please note that there is no available data for the 85 percent of the company’s production that takes place outside of the EU and US. Lower EU/US production means higher uncertainty with regard to the total production of hazardous chemicals, which will have a negative impact on the company’s score in this category.

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Development of Safer Chemicals
7 / 12

Asahi Kasei has a method in place to screen and assess the sustainability of its products and includes the intrinsic hazards of ingredients in the screening process. It does not, however, exclude substances with toxic properties from its new products. Asahi Kasei actively markets safer alternatives on its own website, but not on ChemSec Marketplace. The company has at least one true circular product, process or innovation. Asahi Kasei does not use biobased resources. It does, however, source and treat recycled materials in a sustainable way, which is one of the key elements of a circular economy. Asahi Kasei is not actively reducing the hazardous waste it generates.

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Management & Transparency
2 / 12

The Japanese company does not produce only sustainable products, and has no phase-out strategy for hazardous substances that go beyond regulatory compliance. It shares chemical safety information on its website and is following a credible code of conduct standard. Asahi Kasei did not respond to ChemSec’s attempts to communicate around its ChemScore ranking, and it does not share any information about what kind of chemicals it produces in regions with low regulatory demands for transparency (e.g. Asia). Asahi Kasei has no circular economy program in place, thus lacking objective and measurable circular economy targets.

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Lack of Controversies
0 / 6

Two Asahi Kasei employees have died in work related incidents over the past ten years: One in 2020, due to an explosion at a plant manufacturing lithium-ion batteries in Moriyama, Shiga, and one back in 2012, after being drawn into a suction device at an Asahi Kasei Construction Materials Corporation factory in Ibaraki, Japan. The 2012 incident was actually missed by last year’s ChemScore ranking (the scanning is done manually in local languages). These deadly accidents are big reasons behind Asahi Kasei’s massive drop of points in this category.

Download Controversies Asahi Kasei (PDF, 109 KB)

How did we come to this score?

Do you want to know more about our methodology and how we rank the companies at ChemScore?

Read more about our methodology
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Overall rank
28 / 50
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Total score
12 / 48
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Product Portfolio
3 / 18
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Development of Safer Chemicals
7 / 12
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Management & Transparency
2 / 12
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Lack of Controversies
0 / 6
Documents
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Other years
Year Rank Total score
2024 37 / 51 13 / 48
2023 39 / 50 10 / 48
2022 28 / 54 12 / 48
2021 28 / 50 12 / 48
2020 10 / 35 15 / 48