The growing demand for ever larger TV screens comes with greater resource and energy use. Sony’s sustainability commitments are realizing efficiency gains from product development right through to watching TV.
With BRAVIA, you will be able to enjoy the most immersive TV experiences and stunning designs, right alongside innovations to lower environmental impact by helping reduce energy consumption and the use of non-renewable resources. It’s easy to choose your own settings with BRAVIA to further contribute to reducing environmental impact.
Advanced engineering for the environment
To reduce environmental impact, we are working on multiple aspects of the product life cycle, such as reduction of virgin plastic use, improvement of transportation efficiency, and reviewing energy consumption during use.
With the flexible and configurable Eco Dashboard, energy saving settings can now be centrally managed. You can easily customize energy saving settings for your TV usage, viewing environment, and the content you are watching, all in one place, and visualize the contribution you are making to reduce environmental impact.
[1] Default settings [2] Energy saving settings on
Energy saving features include Idle TV power off, as well as automatic energy saving utilizing a light sensor. As an example of these features, with ambient light sensing enabled on the Eco Dashboard, the screen brightness is automatically adjusted for your room’s lighting, optimizing power consumption.
[1] Darker environment [2] Brighter environment
By turning on energy saving settings from the Eco Dashboard, you can reduce energy consumption by approximately 32%.
[1] Default settings [2] Energy saving settings on
By attaching BRAVIA CAM to detect viewer movement, the screen can be automatically dimmed to minimize power consumption when there is no one in front of the TV, reducing energy use by up to approximately 32%.
Our unique signal processing is designed to deliver both exceptional contrast and optimal energy use. By re-allocating power from dim to bright parts of the image, you can enjoy more realistic pictures as well as reduce energy usage by up to approximately 33%.
[1] Dark [2] Typical brightness [3] Bright
High product quality using recycled materials
Across every design aspect, from material development to aesthetics, we succeeded in increasing our use of recycled material while preserving the high-quality finish. For example, our OLED TVs use SORPLAS™, Sony’s very own recycled plastic, for the rear cover, the largest TV part by area, reducing overall virgin plastic use by approximately 60%.
It can be more difficult to achieve certain qualities of appearance when using recycled plastic materials for exterior parts. However, our SORPLAS recycled plastics can be used with careful raw material selection, composition adjustment during manufacturing, and a proprietary additive recipe, and achieve the beautiful high-gloss black finish customers expect from BRAVIA.
Plastic for home appliances such as TVs contains additives for strength and fire retardancy. The material development for SORPLAS allows minimal use of additives to achieve material properties equal to conventional TVs using general plastic. As a result, the TV will have a long useful lifetime, and a smaller environmental footprint.
SORPLAS is a recycled plastic made from used water bottles, waste optical discs collected from factories and markets, and a proprietary flame retardant. One advantage of SORPLAS is that it won’t degrade too much, even after being recycled several times. Recycled SORPLAS parts have a potential to reduce waste and contribute toward a recycle-oriented society.
Crushed waste optical discs from disc manufacturer Sony Music Solutions Inc. are one of the ingredients of SORPLAS, used for the rear cover.
CO2 emissions from production of SORPLAS used for the rear covers of BRAVIA can be reduced by approximately 57% compared to flame-retardant virgin plastic production used in the same application.
[1] Flame-retardant virgin plastic [2] SORPLAS
Thinking ahead to its collection for further recycling, parts made of SORPLAS are now embossed so they can be distinguished and recovered from among other materials.
We are reviewing every detail of packaging with environmental considerations in mind, leveraging numerous simulations and decades of global logistics experience.
By reengineering the packaging that protects the product during shipping, we cut the package size by approximately 15% and total weight by approximately 12%. This increases the number of units on one pallet, and as a result, CO2 emissions per unit from product transportation have been reduced by approximately 15%.
Product information printed on the package has been carefully considered for simplicity and length in order to reduce print ink usage by approximately 91%, to lower impact without compromising the packaging design and appeal.
Product Design Dept. 2, Product Design Div. 1,
Home Entertainment Business Group
Home Entertainment and Sound Products Business Group
Sony Corporation
The growing demand for ever larger TV screens comes with it the added impact on the environment, called for efforts in reducing BRAVIA’s power consumption. The key to which is the driving technology for the display, the main component of the TV. BRAVIA achieves high-picture-quality image expression that maximizes display performance while reducing power consumption by accurately controlling the backlight LEDs based on various information such as video scenes, ambient brightness, temperature, and the presence and position of people recognized by BRAVIA CAM. In addition, we also put efforts into UI design for the Eco Dashboard, making it more intuitive and easier for users to control their energy-saving settings. Through these and other various approaches, we will continue to contribute to the reduction of environmental impact.
Design Dept. 1, Product Design Div. 2
Home Entertainment Business Group
Home Entertainment and Sound Products Business Group
Sony Corporation
We have been actively using SORPLAS, Sony’s unique recycled plastic, for over a decade and are now using it for the rear covers of some of our TV models. There were various challenges when first considering its application. However, through cooperation with the department in charge of developing SORPLAS, we repeatedly improved the recipe, conducted simulations, and made prototypes, and successfully adopted SORPLAS to TV products without compromising performance or quality, thereby reducing the amount of virgin plastic used. In addition, it is important to reduce the amount of cushioning material in the packaging that protects the product. This will reduce overall plastic usage and at the same time lead to smaller and lighter packaging sizes, which will improve transportation efficiency, thus reducing CO2 emissions. Utilizing our strength simulation technology and logistics know-how, we repeatedly tested the actual product to find the optimal form that reduces our use of cushioning material while maintaining the properties necessary to protect the products. We will continue to leverage our experience and expertise to achieve further reductions in environmental impact through our design activities.
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