July 31, 2025 Okayama Digital Innovation Creation Platform (OI-Start), for which Okayama University National University Corporation serves as the secretariat, held a working session of the Working Group on Carbon Footprint-based Value Creation (CFP Nexus WG) at the Co-Creation The meeting was held at KIBINOVE, an innovation lab on the Tsushima Campus.

The CFP Nexus WG is a collaboration of industry-academia-government-academia, which aims to strengthen the competitiveness of local companies and realize Green Transformation (GX) by taking carbon footprint (CFP) as a starting point, and regularly exchanges opinions and promotes demonstration activities.
The event was attended by about 50 people, including online participants, from companies, researchers, students, and financial institutions.

Mr. Ryufu Nagareta, President and Representative Director of Metal One Ryowa Corporation, introduced the company’s efforts to become carbon neutral in the steel distribution industry.
He reported that the company has achieved steady results, including an annual reduction of 40,000 kWh of electricity by introducing a system to visualize electricity use, which accounts for the majority of energy emissions, promoting data-driven energy-saving operations, and reviewing the starting time of equipment operation.
In his speech, he expressed his company’s commitment to becoming a “100-year company” that is needed by the local community, not only by the company itself, but also through cooperation with companies and universities in the prefecture.

Mr. Toshifumi Nakai of the Sustainable Management Promotion Organization (SuMPO) proposed the “Circular Economy (CE) x Decarbonization Support Package.
This approach aims to reduce environmental impact and costs at the same time by “sharing and generalizing” inefficient inventory and equipment caused by different specifications for each customer in terms of design and management. The combination of CFP, which enables quantification of emissions, and CE index, which evaluates resource recycling, will lead to proposals of environmental value to suppliers.

Finally, he introduced “CORD,” an emission intensity database for CFP and LCA that is easy to use even for small and medium-sized companies.
Since CORD is an easy-to-use tool that does not require specialized knowledge for calculation and can be used for LCA and Scope 3 calculations, participants showed great interest in CORD.

In this working group, it was clearly shown that the movement toward business innovation and co-creation of new value, which is not limited to mere CO2 calculation but is based on CFP, was clearly indicated.
Okayama University will continue to work with local businesses and support organizations to promote practical decarbonization and innovation.

0Carbon Footprint
This refers to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions throughout the entire life cycle of a product or service, from procurement of raw materials to disposal and recycling, converted to CO2 emissions, and the numerical value displayed on the product or a system for displaying this value.