Professor Katsuhiko Kokubu received a Ph. D in business administration from Osaka City University. He has been a professor at the Graduate School of Business Administration, Kobe University since 2001, and in 2003 established the Institute for Environmental Management Accounting, a vehicle for utilizing research achievements. Professor Kokubu chaired a committee of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry on development and promotion of material flow cost accounting and served as a member of a committee of the Ministry of the Environment on environmental reporting guidelines.

In the ADEKA group, CSR is positioned at the heart of management to touch the commitment of top management. Preparing CSR's management structure and by establishing the CSR 5yr plan are considered to be the reflection of their CSR policy. Therefore, in the ADEKA group, the formation of a fundamental framework for CSR management is highly evaluated.

In this year's report, the explanation of AKEDA's Environmentally conscious products is substantial. Usually not an obvious point, the efforts for the development of product technology contributing to the environment are specifically understandable in this report and are highly reputed. Hereafter, within ADEKA, if there is an explanation from a companywide viewpoint, on how technology development for environmentally conscious products is systematically done, etc. Then it would be good to clearly express the position of the company.

The ADEKA group's environmental reports gave the impression of solid writing conforming to a management system. The efforts for advancing sound measures for environmental preservation could be seen. Hereafter, if there are points for improvement in the actions of the ADEKA group from the long term viewpoint of global environmental problems, the business situation will become clearer as a part of the company.

In the ADEKA group reports, the CSR activities of the group business are introduced across 2 pages (p. 43-44). While a majority of these are environmental protection activities, it will be important to include CSR activities as well. In order to do this, sharing knowledge regarding ADEKA's CSR and a place to mutually examine problems is considered necessary for the whole group.

As mentioned above, CSR has been fixed at the center of management in the ADEKA group, however in transferring from a philosophy to specific actions. First of all, even if they are qualitative, the results should be released some targets of CSR should be established and in order to do this, it would be effective to get a wide range of opinions from stakeholders and attach priorities to the actions.
The development from now on is expected to be from the heart.

As a manufacturer of the measures for environmental problems, we comprehend these are important problems. In the past, we have put our strength into developing products considering the environment, our CSR reports also initially began with measures for environmental preservation (environment reports).
As there is usually no opportunity for general customers to see our products, being an intermediate materials manufacturer, CSR reports for this time convey our measures for environment technology in an even more understandable way and a special section for our representative environmentally conscious products was run.
We established an expert committee on promoting CSR in 2007 and actions based on the CSR 5yr plan are promoted, however the current situation is that CSR has still not sufficiently penetrated each individual member of staff, and we are getting to the level of finding out how to specify the recognition CSR holds for business in daily operations. Also, the communal knowledge in the whole of the ADEKA group is insufficient, and the need to further breakdown the CSR 5yr plan is being considered.
To point this out, forming specific action targets relating to CSR philosophy, tackling them for the whole group and releasing these results is considered to be the route our efforts should take. We would like to make the most of the opinions put forward this time in the CSR expansion as of next year.