For today’s assignment on sustainability, ethics, and social responsibility, I have chosen Nintendo. Nintendo is a big part of my life as it was a way for me to escape as a child and even now as an adult when I want to take a step away from reality and relax my anxieties. Nintendo has been around since the end of the 1800’s when it was formed in Kyoto, Japan. I believe that they have made huge strides in becoming a company of the future, but everyone has room to grow and do better.
Nintendo takes employee care and relations very seriously. They have created employee programs that educate and aid in closing the gender and racial gaps that have been in place for so long. The first group is called Black at Nintendo or “B@ND”. B@ND is in place to promote racial equality and help advocate for black communities. During the BLM protests in 2020, Nintendo double matched their employee donations to charities and causes in support of the movement. They have since created outreach programs to aid the black communities with health and mental health advocacy. Nintendo’s second employee program is called “Nintendo Women and Allies”. This program is in place to help increase the number of women in tech through hiring practices and increased promotions from within to managerial status.
When it comes to employees overall, Nintendo adheres to their Global Corporate Social Responsibility with strict worldwide guidelines. Under the guidance of the Responsible Business Alliance, they have created rules that all their production and distribution centers must adhere to. They routinely check in on employee conditions including legal minimum wage, work hours, housing, child and forced labor. Nintendo has employees from around the world convene each year to discuss employee conditions and ways to increase conditions and retention so that they can always keep their employees happy.
Before I give my opinion on Nintendo and how I believe they can improve their green standing, I want to highlight a few things that they do for the environment. A few years ago, they created what they called the “Take Back Program”. This program is a way for anyone to donate any video games or consoles to Nintendo and those items will be fully recycled. They began refurbishing and donating consoles and games to charities around the world that work with children or the elderly. When it comes to other green practices, Nintendo uses sustainable packaging anywhere possible. They use 100% recycled energy in their Washington offices and their Japanese offices use solar and wind power.
In my opinion, Nintendo Is on the right path for sustainability but they are a few years behind and not strict enough on their green energy. I believe that Nintendo could go a step further and make all their offices zero energy. They can afford the installation and upkeep of solar power and most local energy companies will buy the power you don’t need back from you. I think there are also a lot of holes in the energy Nintendo uses to produce and distribute their products. There are no known regulations for their production facilities so even though Nintendo uses as much green energy as they do, the companies that create their physical product are under no such guidelines. I believe that they could tighten up the ways they produce by producing more of the individual products in facilities closer to each other rather than shipping pieces around the world to one place, building them and then shipping them again internationally.
