With growing demand for ever larger TV screens, there is also the risk of greater resource and energy use. However, 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 use of non-renewable resources.
Advanced engineering for sustainability
To reduce environmental impact, we are working on multiple aspects across the product life cycle, such as reduction of virgin plastic, improvement of transportation efficiency, and review of power consumption during use.
Combining high recycling and product quality
Across every design aspect, from material development to aesthetics, we succeeded in increasing our use of recycled material while preserving the high-quality finish. Especially, for OLED TVs, Sony-developed SORPLAS™ recycled plastics are used 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 minimized use of additives to achieve the properties equal to conventional TVs using general plastic. As a result, the TV will have a long useful lifetime, with less environmental footprint.
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 the volume of waste and contribute toward recycle-oriented society.
External Air Injection
Precision moulding techniques make panels strong and beautiful while cutting weight, so packaging also becomes thinner, reducing plastic usage. External air injection presses resin parts with air to eliminate both warping and waste.
[1] Dimples caused by uneven pressure with normal moulding [2] No dimples with External Air Injection moulding [3] Exterior surface
[4] Interior surface [5] Instead of overfilling the plastic, air pressure is applied from the rear to avoid uneven pressure.
Conventionally, packaging material is needed above and below BRAVIA TVs, as well as on the left and right ends. After numerous simulations and decades of global logistics experience, we have optimized packaging design to protect the TV with reduced packaging materials, achieving an approximately 35% reduction of the packaging plastic volume.
By reengineering the packaging that protects the product during shipping, we cut the package size by 15% and total weight by 10%. This increases the number of units on one pallet by approximately 1.3 times. 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 90% to lower impact without compromising the packaging design and appeal.
With ambient light sensing enabled, the screen brightness is optimized for your room’s lighting, and power consumption can be reduced.
[1] Darker environment [2] Brighter environment
By attaching the exclusive accessory BRAVIA CAM to detect viewer movement, when there is no one in front of the TV, the screen is automatically dimmed to minimize power consumption.
One-step TV setup makes setting up easier and more rewarding. You can select Power Saving mode that helps to achieve the desired balance between display brightness and the power usage simply from the initial setup menu.
[1] Off [2] High
Enjoy clean and vibrant images with unique signal processing to optimize every part of the picture.
[1] Dark [2] Typical brightness [3] Bright
Product Design Dept 2, TV Business Group
Sony Corporation
Since 2010, our TV department has been actively using SORPLAS™, a recycled plastic with a high recycling rate, in order to design products in an environmentally conscious way.
As TVs become larger and the number of units being shipped increases, so does the impact on the environment. In order to produce larger TVs while reducing impact on the environment, we have been developing materials together with group companies since 2018, using SORPLAS™ not only for internal parts, but also for the exterior, which comprises a large amount of plastic.
To use SORPLAS™ for exterior parts requires a high level of design knowhow, but after repeated prototyping and recipe improvements, we developed a SORPLAS™ formula that can be used for the back cover, which has the largest surface area, and it will be used in some of the 2021 BRAVIA XR models onward, reducing the amount of virgin plastic by half compared with previous models.
BRAVIA will, in addition to SORPLAS™, introduce other recycled materials at all of their production facilities and continue to make further contributions to reducing environmental impact around the world.
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