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JFS Newsletter No.185 (January 2018)
Image by fdecomite Some Rights Reserved.
In our July 2017 issue, we introduced the story of Nihonkai Gas Co. practicing a business model known as "Product as a Service" (PaaS), which promotes the "circular economy" concept of selling services, rather than products.
Selling Services, Not Products: 15 years of Efforts and Achievements by Nihonkai Gas
https://www.japanfs.org/en/news/archives/news_id035860.html
Nihonkai Gas, based in Toyama City, Toyama Prefecture, is active in a broad range of business areas including selling gas appliances, in addition to its main business of producing, supplying and selling a variety of gas products. The company also sells fan heaters as one of its gas appliance products.
Besides selling fan heaters, the company offers a new service, a heater rental program that responds to the needs of customers who want warmth during wintertime. By renting out fan heaters, the company really is selling only "warmth" as a service. In the "circular economy," this approach of selling the service provided by a product, not the product itself, is called Product as a Service (PaaS).
The PaaS-style gas fan heater rental service was launched by the president and CEO, Hachiro Nitta, in September 2001. A cumulative total of 21,622 fan heaters was rented to date in the 17 years since the service started.
The company has a high ratio of repeat customers, as they are attracted to the services of delivery and collection, cleaning and maintenance, while they don't need any storage space for the units in summer and they pay almost no initial purchase costs.
The Nihonkai Gas heater rental program results in a longer product life cycle for fan heaters thanks to having the maintenance work done by trained personnel, and this helps reduce the resources and energy consumed in manufacturing.
The fan heater rental service appears to be environmentally friendly because of the extended product life cycle of the heaters. But how good are they really for the environment? The company conducted a project to estimate the effects of the service in collaboration with experts in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This article reports on the LCA project for the fan heater rental service.
Image by bBear.
Professor Hidefumi Kurasaka and his team at Chiba University Graduate School made their Future Chart program available for public use from October 30, 2017. An online data visualizer for cities, Future Chart allows anyone to obtain a set of future projections for a given municipality in Japan.
Future Chart takes in various data and statistics for a designated city or town and simulates its future state provided current trends are unchanged. The results, displayed every five years until year 2040, cover about 10 areas including industry structure, childcare services, education, healthcare services, elderly care, and management of public facilities, roads and farmland.
The simulation results are designed to help communities not only visualize their current state but also identify community-specific impacts and issues posed by Japan's declining and aging population, thus providing a long-term vision for developing local policies and comprehensive community planning.
Future Chart is already being utilized at "Future Workshops," in which junior and senior high school students develop policies as imaginary mayors in the year 2040. So far, the workshops have been held in Ichihara, Yachiyo, Tateyama and Matsudo in Chiba and Shizuoka prefectures.
Future Chart is a program in the Open Project on Stock Sustainability Management (OPoSSuM) led by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) Center for Social Technology Research and Development. The OPoSSuM research team plans to promote broader use of Future Chart and support the organization of Future Workshops as a basis for local policymaking that ensures the long-term sustainability of Japan's municipalities.
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