Toray Industries, Inc.
On April 23, 2022, the Social Contribution Group of CSR Operations Dept. took part in the Arakawa Clean-aid in Shimohirai Riverside Fun School held by the Arakawa River Clean-aid Forum, a nonprofit organization (NPO), and cleaned the riverbed.
Arakawa Clean-aid is an activity in which various people come together to pick up the trash in the riverbed of Arakawa River which runs through Saitama Prefecture and Tokyo, and think of issues such as river waste, water quality, and recovery of nature, and work to regain rich nature. The NPO invited citizens to participate in the event and a total of 80 people, which included employee volunteers from other companies, their family members, college and high school students.
The feature of Arakawa Clean-aid is “picking up and researching litter,” where participants separate the waste over many categories by recording the type of the waste in a survey card rather than just picking up trash. The participants together gathered about 175 kilograms of waste in a total of 50 bags including 23 bags of burnable trash, 12 bags of PET bottles, non-burnable trash, cans, and bottles.
A large portion of the collected wastes is thought to have been thrown in somewhere else and floated down in addition to those floated in and accumulated due to the impact of tide. There remains a lot more trash in the water, which will eventually flow into the Tokyo Bay and keep floating in the ocean. This thought made us realize the importance of using things properly and discarding them in a proper manner.
After picking up waste, we observed the fries of sea bass and shijimi clams that live in the Arakawa River. Riverside Fun School is a project promoted by a collaboration of the three ministries of Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, and the Ministry of the Environment to promote environmental education and experiences in a natural environment in nearby riverfronts in a concerted effort by citizens’ groups, river administrators, and educators for deepening the understanding of the relationship between humans and environment and to nurture rich humanity. More than 280 locations around the country including Shimohirai have been registered with the project.
CSR Operations Dept. has been conducting Toray Group Arakawa Clean-aid in collaboration with Arakawa River Clean-aid Forum for Toray Group employees. We cancelled the event in fiscal 2020 and 2021 from the perspective of preventing the spread of COVID-19 infection. Going forward, we will consider how to hold the event in the future.
[1] Clean Aid: A coined word for clean (cleaning up) and aid (help) which refers to picking up litter and enriching nature.
