Vtech 2009 Annual Report Download - page 21

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VTech Holdings Ltd Annual Report 2009 19
TEL and CMS businesses are ISO14001 certified, while the
ELP business abides by the International Council of Toy
Industries (ICTI) CARE (Caring, Awareness, Responsible,
Ethical) Process.
Annual audits are conducted to ensure we meet the
national standards for air quality, noise pollution and
waste water disposal. We adopt a strict classification
system for waste and toxic waste, based on international
norms, which is disposed by a specialist contractor.
Stringent procedures are in place to handle hazardous
materials. Electricity usage is benchmarked against
production to ensure that we make continuous
improvements in energy intensity, through installing new
equipment or changing processes.
In offices and factories, we encourage reduced use of
paper and recycling of materials. We also encourage our
vendors to take environmental considerations into
account when supplying parts and raw materials.
Safe & Green Products
When VTech designs a new product, or upgrades an
existing product, we always try to see whether it can be
improved not just in the way it looks and works, but from
an environmental point of view. This also benefits
consumers through lower costs.
Our products comply with the strictest international
safety and environmental regulations. Notably, all
products of the Group sold in Europe comply with RoHS,
the European Directive on the “Restriction on the use of
certain Hazardous Substances”. In addition, despite not
being required by legislation, in 2009 we have extended
the RoHS standard to our entire cordless phone lineup for
the US market.
Through constant refinements to designs, we steadily
reduce the number of components, reducing cost and
waste. We are currently studying the use of bio-degradable
plastic resins for ELPs in order to reduce the impact to
the environment.
Since one of the biggest environmental impacts from
electronics products is in the use of electricity, we pay
particular attention to improving the energy efficiency
of our products. All VTech cordless phones delivered to
the US have been Energy Star® certified set by the US
Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of
Energy. In other countries, we are updating our cordless
phone lineup gradually to include “Eco Mode” function
which reduces power consumption.
Environmentally-Friendly Packaging
Packaging is another area of focus. The packaging for our
latest phones, for example, uses only two materials. The
box size has been reduced by 20-30% and it is printed
with vegetable oil based inks, using fewer colours. Similar
effort is also ongoing with the ELP business. We are
making more effort to optimise the size and the structure
of our packaging to preserve the environment.
The new packaging of our TEL products uses only two materials.
The box size is reduced and it is printed with fewer colours.