Use & Efficiency

Buildings

A Super-Green Factory: The Sharp Kameyama Plant

Tetsuo Kusakabe^a1

^a1 Sharp Corporation, Japan

Sharp Corporation is making a concerted effort to reduce environmental impacts to the greatest extent possible at its production facilities around the world, and it is applying its own original evaluation criteria to recognize those plants having an extremely high level of environmental performance as “SuperGreen Factories.”

Our Kameyama plant, the frst such factory to be so recognized, is an integrated, start-to-fnish production facility for liquid-crystal display (LCD) televisions (TVs), from fabricating the LCD panel to assembling the fnished TV set (see Table I). Given that large amounts of energy are consumed to operate production equipment and to power air conditioning, we focused particular attention on environmental measures intended to reduce global warming and introduced an energy supply system that combines environmental friendliness and operational stability. As shown in Figure 1, this system is based on integrating different types of large-scale distributed power sources and consists of a gas-fred cogeneration system, a fuel cell system, and a photovoltaic power generating system. The power output of this system covers about one-third of the total electrical needs of the plant.

Tetsuo Kusakabe can be reached at Kameyama Environmental and Industrial Safety Center, AVC LCD Group, Sharp Corporation, 464, Kougawa, Shiraki-cho, Kameyama-shi, Mie Prefecture 519–0198, Japan; tel. +81–595–84–1603, fax +81–595–84–1729, and e-mail kusakabe. tetsuo@sharp.co.jp.

Kusakabe is general manager at Kameyama Environmental and Industrial Safety Center, AVC LCD Group, at the Sharp Corporation in Japan. He joined Sharp in March, 1965. Kusakabe is engaged in establishing new Sharp bases in Japan. For the Kameyama Plant, he worked in cooperation with local governments and related businesses from the site-selection stage and contributed to improving the brand image by making the facility an environmentally advanced plant through the introduction of state-of-the-art environmental technologies.