Circular economy – enabling the value cycle

With circular principles as our guide, we strive to minimize pollution, waste, and use of resources in all our opera-tions to reduce the environmental impact of our products and solutions along their lifecycle, from the extraction of raw materials transport to customers’ use, and end-of-life, to protect the planet, empower people, and show how sustainability is key to long-term profit. 

In Hitachi Energy, we’re envisioning a value cycle instead of ‘just’ a value chain.

We are a recognized leader in installing high-voltage equipment vital to ensuring renewable energy solutions’ relia-ble and safe connection to the grid, with a successful track record and experience collaborating with stakeholders to create more circular, sustainable solutions. 

With this expertise, we are uniquely positioned to deliver our services to maintain, upgrade, monitor, and refurbish delivered equipment. These benefits are integrated throughout our service offerings. For example, our EconiQ® 

Retrofill offering allows customers to replace high-GWP SF6 insulation gas with our eco-efficient alternative gas mixture. This results in significant environmental savings and minimized downtime for customers.

In addition to delivering Lifecycle Assessments (LCAs), we have developed the EcoSpace™ and EcoSmart™ platforms, which enable quantitative modeling and estimation of the environmental footprint associated with diverse energy solutions and service configurations across the entire product lifecycle.

To improve circularity, we consider eco-design for all newly designed and developed products, following the IEC 62430 approach and we include the consideration of eco-design principles into our research and development processes.

We futureproof our business with resource efficiency as a key operational driver. This includes a commitment to send zero waste to landfill sites and achieve 100 percent plastic waste recovery across manufacturing facilities by 2030. Additionally, we extend our focus to enable circularity across our value chain, or value cycle. 

We are dedicated to minimizing the use of water, materials, and hazardous substances and reducing and ‘designing out’ pollution and waste across the lifecycle of our offerings through a circular mindset. Steel, copper, aluminium, plastics, and insulating oil are the main materials of our products and are mostly recoverable at end-of-life. However, packaging, waste oil, electronic equipment, and thermoset plastics, such as epoxy resins, still represent a waste challenge.