Promoting Energy Conservation in Manufacturing Across the I-PEX Group

In recent years, active efforts to prevent global warming have become a global issue. In response to climate change, the I-PEX Group is working to reduce its carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, one of the greenhouse gases that is considered to be the cause of global warming.

In 2022, the I-PEX Group set medium-to long-term goals to reduce its Scope 1*¹ and Scope 2*² CO₂ emissions (from production and equivalent sites) by 40% by 2030 (base year: 2021) and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. The factor in the I-PEX Group’s operations that has the greatest impact on climate change linked to global warming is the CO₂ associated with the purchased electricity the Group uses.

We are therefore pursuing initiatives such as saving energy in production and expanding our use of renewable energy.

During a six-month period from October 2023 to March 2024, we conducted activities to identify “wasteful” electricity consumption and take measures to improve and use energy more efficiently at our Ogori Plant (Ogori City, Fukuoka Prefecture), a production site that brings together the production departments of all our divisions. We set a challenging goal to reduce our energy consumption by 10% year-on-year. By reviewing daily electricity consumption, we began with immediate actions such as turning off unnecessary equipment and lights in unused areas, and insulating windows.

To further reduce energy use, we proactively reviewed the operation of production equipment, replaced old air conditioning units, and installed air conditioning control systems.

Although we did not meet our target, we were able to reduce electricity consumption by 2% year-on-year.

Using the initiatives taken during the Eco-Challenge as a model, we continue to pursue energy savings and eliminate “waste” in our energy consumption by verifying the results of our activities through our monthly electricity consumption.

We aim to promote energy-saving initiatives that are effective by sharing know-how and materials among our Group. We are also working to create a system for sharing improvement initiatives for newly identified areas of improvement, allowing for trial and error. We have also set a common target of reducing our electricity consumption by 1% year-on-year at each of our sites, to align the energy saving efforts with numbers.

Believing that the awareness and action of each employee are necessary to strive for energy-saving, we also provide information about our electricity consumption on our internal website through the “Electricity Dashboard,” allowing users to see the latest electricity consumption result for each site and the total for the whole I-PEX Group as well as a year-on-year comparison.

We are also considering the introduction of an internal award for sites that have reduced CO₂ emissions the most, to encourage further energy savings in production and raise awareness among employees.