Road to Zero: Our Commitment to Environmental Improvement

At Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), we recognize that gaming has impact beyond entertainment – we must consider how we can use our platform for positive change. As part of our ‘Road to Zero’ environmental plan, Sony has set a range of targets addressing the impacts of our operations, considering the whole lifecycle of our products and services from cradle to grave.

Ahead of Earth Day, we’re reflecting on the milestones we’ve achieved in the past year and the environmental initiatives driving us forward.

Road to Zero

Sony’s Road to Zero environmental plan, launched in 2010, aims to achieve zero environmental impact by 2050, focusing on four key pillars: curbing climate change, conserving resources, controlling chemical substances, and promoting biodiversity.

Climate Change

In 2022, in response to increasingly serious global climate risks, Sony moved its climate targets forward to 2040, including achieving net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions¹. SIE tracks and makes projections of our organizational emissions annually, including our largest sources of emissions: product use, manufacturing, packaging, distribution, retail, end-of-life, content distribution, and data centers. Although our estimated emissions fluctuate each year, in part due to the cyclical nature of console sales, the trend in our projections shows emissions decreasing in line with our net zero targets. This is mainly driven by expected reductions in the carbon intensity of electricity supply, as countries adopt more renewable and low-carbon technologies. 

We are continuing to find new approaches and opportunities to reduce carbon emissions further and continually improve towards our long-term targets².

Our progress to reduce our climate change impact in FY24

Developing new energy saving features. In September, we announced a new rest mode feature available to users of the slimmer PS5 console model and PS5 Pro, called adaptive charging³. Adaptive charging can reduce energy use by adjusting the time power is supplied to your accessories based on its remaining battery charge, allowing the console to drop into a lower-power rest mode. When adaptive charging is selected, your console will consume 0.3 W to 1 W once your accessory charging is complete, versus 2.6 W to 3.1 W, a reduction of up to 80%.

Delivering higher performance without increasing energy use. PS5 Pro, launched in November 2024, delivers advanced ray tracing, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution, and optimized console performance. Despite higher performance, the PS5 Pro maintains comparable energy use to PS5. We’ve published power measurements of all our consoles since PlayStation 3 – to check the average power of your console, take a look at our webpage playstation.com/ecodesign. 

Enabling users to support renewable energy projects. We’re excited to share news about a new third-party application called CleanPlay, now available in the PlayStation Store. Accessible from the PlayStation 5 console, the application will give players insight into the energy use of gaming and how to reduce it, matching them with opportunities to support new renewable energy projects to help the transition to zero-carbon energy, offering digital rewards for their contributions. Within the app, users can become educated on the initiatives supporting renewable energy and designate contributions towards their preferred outlet. For more information on CleanPlay, you can visit CleanPlay.com. 

Conserving Resources

The production and distribution of games consoles requires significant quantities of natural resources, including rare earth metals, plastics, and other materials. We aim to minimize resource consumption and maximize recycling to improve resource efficiency in our business activities and throughout the life cycle of our products.

Our progress to improve resource efficiency in FY24

Reducing plastic in our packaging. We continue to make progress towards our targets to eliminate plastic packaging from newly designed smaller products and decrease the amount of plastic packaging used for other products by 10%. New products released in FY2024 use 99-100% fiber-based packaging solutions (by weight), depending on the product⁴, including our new Midnight Black PULSE Elite Wireless Headset which uses 100% fiber-based packaging. In total all current SIE products use 95-100% fiber-based packaging. We continue to investigate suitable plastic packaging alternatives where they remain being used, typically for the necessary protection of our products.

Using recycled plastics in our products. We increased the share of recycled plastic from post-industrial waste used in our game boxes on average globally from 21% in FY23 to 26% in FY24. We continue to investigate opportunities to use recycled plastics in our products and will continue to report on our progress.

Switching to paper-based gift cards. In FY24, we eliminated the use of plastic in our gift cards and transitioned globally to paper-based cards. These are sourced from Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified suppliers and made from 100% recyclable materials.

Office initiatives on single-use plastics. Our offices worldwide are making progress to reduce single-use plastic items wherever possible. Our employee cafe in Liverpool has kept its 100% no single-use item status, while our London office has replaced all plastic packaging for food produced on site for reusable or compostable options where possible. All packaging items in our San Mateo cafe are compostable, and our Tokyo office has continued its commitment to no single use plastics in conference rooms.

Community Engagement

Through our PlayStation brand and products, SIE is uniquely positioned to create engagement with a community of over 120 million monthly active users. We are finding new ways to leverage our creativity and technology to enable and inspire action on environmental issues.

Our progress to inspire action in FY24

In 2022 we started Aloy’s Forest, an initiative supporting programs to conserve ecosystems in conjunction with the launch of Horizon Forbidden West, a PlayStation Studios game developed by Guerrilla Games. The game’s storyline – Aloy’s quest to restore order and balance to her world – is a reminder of the importance of preserving nature and biodiversity on Earth. This work is part of our commitment to the United Nations Playing for the Planet Alliance to raise awareness on biodiversity. So far, we’ve supported the reforestation of over 740,000 trees, and in 2025 we’re exploring new and exciting ways to use our technology to support ecosystem restoration and promote biodiversity.

We are excited to announce further expansion of Aloy’s Forest in 2025. SIE has committed to a new collaboration with the Arbor Day Foundation to plant 56,180 trees on former strip-mining land in the United States. This initiative aims to serve as a model for the restoration of an ecosystem that has been significantly impacted by the extraction of raw materials. While SIE did not source from this area, sites like it are essential for energy production and also materials for use in products like consoles.

Funding new research with the University of Oxford’s Department of Biology. This research project will create a new digital forest model within Oxford’s Wytham Woods, with the aim of advancing and validating low-cost imaging and sensing technologies for assessing biodiversity and above-ground carbon storage. The project will use smartphone-based tools and 3D-imaging and sensing technologies provided by the AITRIOS^TM5 platform from Sony Semiconductor Solutions. The team plans to test these technologies at one or more reafforestation sites globally, working together with our partners at the Arbor Day Foundation. Lead Investigator, Prof. Graham Taylor, commented “Recent advances in cutting-edge AI have enabled us to reconstruct and visualize the 3D architecture of plants using affordable handheld devices in place of expensive scanners. Our vision is to advance and validate these low-cost technologies here in Oxford so that they can be put into the hands of communities around the globe to assess biodiversity, monitor recovery, and measure carbon storage locally.”

Strengthening data driven conservation with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). We’re supporting ZSL projects to enhance conservation effectiveness in protected areas by expanding the adoption of SMART technology across at least two national park networks. ZSL is a founding member of SMART, an innovative technology platform for monitoring and managing wildlife and threats in protected areas, which empowers frontline conservationists in over 1,500 parks in over 100 countries to practice data-driven conservation.

SIE continues to contribute to the United Nations Playing for the Planet alliance. We have pioneered an application, Climate Station^TM, in collaboration with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). Climate Station uses virtual reality technology to allow people to view, interact with, and understand complex climate data to raise awareness about climate change. Last year SIE demonstrated Climate Station at the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi (UNEA-6) and are collaborating with researchers at the University of Oxford to complete a study of how leaders, policymakers, and stakeholders perceived this technology and its potential applications. SIE also used Climate Station to prepare videos comparing warming scenarios at different COP locations which were displayed at COP29 in Baku.

Volunteering programs for employees. Our employee volunteer programs continued with global participation in a range of beach clean ups and conservation activities over the past year. We give thanks to our partners including, Vinters Valley, The Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in the UK, as well as the Surfrider Foundation and I Love a Clean S an Diego in the US.

About Our Approach

Sony’s recently established sustainability vision, Inspire a World Filled With Emotion for This Generation and Beyond, underscores its commitment to creating a society where everyone can live with peace of mind in a healthy and natural environment. As a part of Sony Group, this vision is the foundation of our sustainability efforts, supporting it with our aim to use our creativity and technology to inspire change and have an impact beyond gaming by acting on three principles:

• Forging Our Own Path: Addressing the specific challenges and opportunities of our business.
• Turning Intention into Action: Setting clear goals and holding ourselves accountable for progress.
• Doing the Right Things and Doing Them Well: Prioritizing meaningful impact.

There is certainly much more work to do, and we will continue to share our progress.