Ricoh has been working on environmental conservation since the 1980s by saving energy, recycling, and preventing pollution. They started using environmental accounting in 1998 to track the costs and effects of their conservation efforts. This helps them make decisions on how to manage resources and projects for environmental conservation. Ricoh codes the costs of conservation activities and measures their impact on the environment and the company's finances. They also set their own environmental efficiency index. The Ministry of the Environment in Japan has adopted Ricoh's approach in their guidelines for environmental accounting.