Founded in 1881, Okawa Printing Co Ltd, which celebrates its 143rd anniversary this year, has started a new business that will introduce scanning robots and other equipment to enable companies and organisations to go paperless with 100% renewable energy, as initiatives such as de-plasticisation and paperless are progressing. The company will start a new business that will make companies and organisations paperless using 100% renewable energy.

Okawa Printing is one of Japan’s leading long-established printing companies and is also one of the leading companies promoting carbon-neutral, carbon-free management that aims to achieve the SDGs as a Social Printing Company® that aims to solve social issues through printing, by achieving 100% renewable energy in 2019 and obtaining SBT certification in 2021. In 2023, the company received the 2023 Minister of the Environment’s Award for Climate Change Action in the category of “Promotion and Mitigation” in 2023.

The new project will not only store documents, materials and literature stored and held by companies and organisations, but also digitise them as required, convert the data to AI OCR, make them searchable and also develop the use of chat GPT.

Documents that are no longer needed after being digitised can be dissolved as confidential documents, converted into recycled paper and revived as new products, so-called upcycling. Furthermore, historical documents and literature held by companies, organisations, museums and local archives are also converted into data so that they can be utilised. The aim is to be prepared in the event of a disaster.

The digitisation of valuable historical documents and archives is expected to be increasingly utilised in the future to decipher brush strokes and continued scripts, thanks to the development of AI technology. These are expected not only to lead to a better understanding and transmission of local culture and history, but also to regional development and economic development.