While manufacturing motors that support our daily lives, we are also focusing on environmental initiatives

In the Tsuruoka area where I work, we have two bases, the Central Office and the West Office, where we produce products such as AC motors, compact, lightweight, high-output, and highly efficient brushless motors that use permanent magnets to control motors with circuits, gear heads that are attached to the motor's output shaft to increase torque and adjust the rotation speed, drivers, which are the circuits that control motors, and fan motors that use propellers to blow air and regulate the temperature.

These motors are used in a wide variety of industries and situations, such as the drive units of conveyors and automatic guided vehicles (AGV / AMR) that transport goods within factories, food machinery and agricultural machinery such as weighing machines, packaging machines and seeding machines, transportation equipment such as ETC gates and ATMs, financial equipment, and in towns, conveyor belt sushi lanes, service robots, and surveillance cameras. Our strengths include a wide variety of products to meet the movement needs of all our customers, and a stable supply system that delivers the products you need, when you need them.

We produce our products with the idea that "we will never ship defective products to our customers, whether they order one unit or 100."

Electricity is essential to make and operate motors, but energy conservation is required in society as part of the movement to promote carbon neutrality by 2050. Therefore, we have published our environmental initiatives, which are centered on both product initiatives and business activities, in the "Oriental Motor Report 2024."

▲Page 1 of the "Oriental Report 2024." Oriental Motor's initiatives are explained in detail.

In our business activities, we are actively promoting the shift to renewable energy and energy-saving activities with the participation of all employees. In terms of product initiatives, we are focusing on expanding sales of brushless motors, which are energy-saving, small, and high-output motors that can contribute to reducing CO2 emissions for our customers. In addition, wherever motors are used in our company, we are promoting carbon neutral activities such as replacing them with more energy-efficient ones.

Energy conservation outside of production facilities is key

Our company is working towards the goal of "reducing CO2 emissions by 50 % by 2030 compared to 2013 levels." Even in this situation, we need to produce many motors and increase sales, but making motors uses a lot of electricity. In fact, we know that more than 90 % of the energy we use is electricity, including fossil fuels such as kerosene and gasoline. For this reason, we first started by working to save electricity.

We are often asked to "make electricity visible," but in fact we have been doing this for about 10 years. However, we had not yet started to save energy in our production facilities because there was a risk that changes in manufacturing conditions would affect quality.

So, in 2024, I was put in charge of managing the buildings and air conditioning facilities as an environmental manager, and I was gathering information hoping to improve the working environment for employees while also saving energy. That's when I came across Macnicut.

It was easy to see the effect by comparing under the same conditions

There have been many sales pitches about energy conservation and insulation in the past, but to be honest, many of them lacked credibility. For example, I remember hearing stories in the past like "We painted the roof of our company building with a more expensive paint that has a heat-shielding effect," or "We installed a waterproof sheet worth tens of millions of yen on the roof, which is not a half-roofed roof," but no one had been able to verify the effectiveness of these things numerically.

However, "Macnicut" was different. First of all, the explanations that "it can reflect light" and "the paint is thick and the hollow beads inside provide the same insulating effect as styrofoam" were very convincing. Also, on one floor, there are two air conditioners, A and B, with the same output, and the decisive factor was that we were able to conduct an experiment to see what would happen if we painted "Macnicut" on one of the outdoor units and not the other.

Usually, such improvements are often measured using data comparing with the previous year, but because temperatures vary from year to year, it is difficult to show a clear effect. In that respect, Macnicut 's results were persuasive because they allowed comparisons under identical conditions. It's great to be able to visualize the data, after all.

The environmental manager at another business site is also attracted to the idea.

The first trial application of Macnicut was in March​ ​2022, and data was collected for a year to confirm its effectiveness. Full-scale application was then carried out in early March​ ​2023, with good results.

Recently, a year's worth of data has been collected from the new building, and they are considering giving it a try if it is that effective. The environmental manager at another facility also seems to be interested in the idea, saying, "If we can reduce electricity use by 20 % just by painting it, that's great." Another big attraction is that no special maintenance is required after painting.

Preparations for horizontal expansion are complete, and I want to paint it every year.

We would like to continue to expand this to the entire company, starting with the Tsuruoka Central and Tsuruoka West offices. We update our old air conditioners every year, so we would appreciate your cooperation in updating them as well.

About 30 to 40 % of the electricity used in the Tsuruoka area is for air conditioning, so if we paint everything, we can reduce CO2 emissions by 20 %, or about 6 to 8 %. This figure will have a big impact on our efforts to achieve a 50 % reduction by 2030, so we're looking forward to seeing what happens.

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