Fujifilm goes green with wind

Fujifilm has installed five Vestas wind turbines at its Tilburg manufacturing and R&D plant in the Netherlands as part of a drive to reduce its environmental impact.
 
The five wind turbines are now fully operational and are each able to generate a maximum of two megawatts. Together they are capable of generating approximately 20 percent of the total energy used by the 63-hectare Tilburg site. Fujifilm Manufacturing Europe said the installation is part of an effort to make Tilburg a carbon neutral site, with the wind turbines alone likely to reduce CO2 emissions by 12,000 tonnes per year.
 
The company has also installed a water recycling facility, consisting of two large water purification units, on site. With these and other sustainability measures in place, Fujiflim Manufacturing Europe estimates that it currently reuses 13 percent of the waste it produces, recycles 68 percent, regenerates 18 percent and is left with less than one percent of the total site waste to dispose of.

 
Fujifilm is also investigating the possibility of cleaning some of the waste water the site generates for reuse within the production process, as well as the option of constructing a complete waste water treatment system on site, in collaboration with three neighboring companies. In addition, a feasibility study is also in progress for replacing the natural gas used in production with bio-gas, with the results of this study due to be available at the end of 2011.
 
Ryuta Masui, senior vice president at Fujifilm Europe, said: ‘Fujifilm has always been committed to the environment as we feel that we have a responsibility to reduce our burden on the planet as much as possible. With the last of our five windmills now in production¸ we are proud to be able to generate 20 percent of the energy we consume at our Tilburg manufacturing site through wind power.’
 
‘It’s not only the way in which we manufacture our products that is important but also the products themselves. We aim to manufacture both process-less and low-chemistry offset plates at this site, and are also in the process of developing other exciting products for sustainable applications in other areas of our business here at Tilburg.’
 
The company added that a third state-of-the-art offset plate manufacturing line is close to completion at Tilburg. The new PS-10 line has been designed to be able to manufacture Fujifilm’s ‘lo-chem’ family of plates, alongside Fujifilm’s most advanced printing plate to date, the recently launched Brillia HD PRO-T3.