There is a demand in the country for the enactment of an independent measure as an environmental policy for the promotion of the Basic Environment Plan. To comply with this requirement, an outline was given detailing the independent measures that are being taken to reduce the environmental impact of the printing industry.

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In recent years, environmental regulations concerning chemical management have become more stringent. The scope of these regulations has been expanded. Now, in addition to new chemical substances, the regulations include existing substances that are commonly used and chemical substances contained in products. In this review, the regulations of major countries and regions are summarized, including an examination of their background.

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Ten years have passed since NNI was started in the United States. During the past decade, there has been a huge amount of R&D funding for nanotechnology among three major areas. As a result, nanotechnology offshoots have been created in the fields of nanoelectronics, nanobionics, and nanomaterials. Printed electronics applications (including nanogreen applications such as PV) will also be forthcoming if we can meet the needs of the market. On the other hand, issues of Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS) with regard to nanomaterials have also been raised during this period. Some environmentalists have pointed out potential EHS problems involving nanomaterials. In 2006, some toxicological scientists presented the "Particle Hypothesis" and the "Fiber Hypothesis" (OECD⁄WPMN & ISO⁄TC229-WG3) to tackle these problems. We will be able to obtain the results of these hypotheses and reach the next stage this year. It is important for us to discuss industrial measurements and evaluations, especially with regard to EHS.

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Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be classified roughly into two approaches. One is "within the fence-line" and the other is "beyond the fence-line." The former is done by measuring, reporting, and verification (MRV) and by setting reduction goals for many different "fence-lines," for example, goals for different regions, countries, industries, organizations, etc. The latter approach requires a life-cycle mindset and takes into account the problem of carbon leakage that occurs among the different fence-lines. It is believed that this approach will provide important insights and benefits when striving to reduce GHG emissions in a global economy. One implementation of this approach is the identification of the carbon footprint of products (CFP), which indicates the global warming impacts of products and services throughout their life cycle. The Japanese printing industry has been eager to calculate the CFPs of its products. It has been determined that product weight and the number of copies are two key factors that influence the CFP value of printed materials. Owing to the earthquake and the subsequent severe nuclear crisis, Japan can no longer rely heavily on nuclear power. With the emergence of developing countries around the world, fossil fuel prices are expected to fluctuate and rise. Under these circumstances, CFP is not only a method for communicating the corporate social responsibility (CSR), but it can also be seen as a tool to identify fossil fuel hotspots throughout the value-chain of a product. Using CFP as an evaluation tool can spur innovation, reducing not only GHG emissions but also costs and future risks. This will lead to an increased competitive advantage for individual products, and it should help organizations to build a more robust and sustainable business.

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Safety is a keyword for good operation. First, the concept of machine safety, including separation, energy dissipation, and de-energized stop principles, is introduced. The ISO⁄IEC machine-safety standards system is presented, and examples of protective measures based on ISO 12643 are described with regard to this concept. Finally, the required safety tasks of manufactures (designers) and users are discussed. The author expects that the machine user will be responsible for machine safety because in the ISO⁄IEC standards, users play a part in reducing risk.

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In Ministry of the Environment, the way of the future water environmental conservation was examined, and an interim report was performed in December, 2009. The effectiveness of new wastewater management technique (Whole Effluent Toxicity: WET) using bioassay is considered in that. This report introduces the need of the introduction of the WET system in Japan and an examination status to date.

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In the printing workflow, we want to construct an image processing system including the image's expansion processing, contraction processing, and gradation adjustment processing for binary images. When the binary image is halftone images with mixed text image, we must to separate the image area between the halftone image and the text image. Because we want to achieve high image quality at one image that the smooth outline can be reproduced for text image and represented in photographic image (halftone image) without gradation moiré and uneven. In the paper, we offer a new method to separate the image area between the half tone image and the text image area. The outline of the closed area of halftone dots was extracted by applying the border line trace process to the binary image and by obtaining a mask image representing the halftone image from contours consisted of the closed areas by the closing process using a morphological operation. It realizes smooth outline for text image reproduction and high-quality photographic image (halftone image) without gradation moiré and uneven.

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