Sumitomo Rubber Industries Installs Rooftop Solar Panel Array In Thailand

Sumitomo Rubber Industries, Ltd. is pleased to announce that our tire manufacturing and sales subsidiary in Thailand, Sumitomo Rubber (Thailand) Co., Ltd., is in the process of installing the world’s largest rooftop solar panel array (for a single facility) as well as a gas cogeneration system and will also begin receiving green electric power supplied by Kansai Energy Solutions (Thailand) Co., Ltd. (K-EST), which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Kansai Electric Power Co., Inc. (KEPCO). We are also pleased to announce that Sumitomo Rubber signed an agreement with KEPCO concerning the provision of renewable energy certificates.

With support from the Japanese Ministry of the Environment as part of their “2022 Financing Program for Joint Crediting Mechanism (JCM) Model Projects,” K-EST will be installing a rooftop solar panel array (around 40,000 panels with a total output of approximately 22MW) as well as a gas cogeneration system (two 6.6MW boilers) at Sumitomo Rubber (Thailand)’s Factory in Rayong Province. All of the electric power and steam that this equipment generates will be supplied directly to the factory, replacing the energy sources that the factory currently uses. Once this project is complete, we estimate that it will reduce the factory’s total annual CO₂ emissions by approximately 38,000 tons.

At the same time, the factory will also be making the transition to carbon-free electric energy thanks to I-REC precured and provided by KEPCO. As these I-REC represent the renewable energy attributes of biomass electric power that is generated by incinerating excess branches, trunks, and other scraps that are left over after rubber trees are harvested for lumber in Thailand, this project will also contribute to our Sustainable Natural Rubber efforts.

In light of accelerating climate change and other major recent developments concerning the most pressing issues that our global society faces today, the Sumitomo Rubber Group came to the conclusion that a new policy, one based on long-term perspectives to foresee the world of 2050, would be essential to the sustained growth and development of both our group and society as a whole. And so, we formulated and unveiled our “Driving Our Future Challenge 2050” Long-Term Sustainability Policy in August of 2021. Since then, we have been making steady progress on various efforts to realize the aims of this policy, especially when it comes to carbon neutrality. Having set an ambitious target of reducing our annual Scope 1 and 2 CO₂ emissions by 50% (compared with 2017 emissions) by the year 2030, we now anticipate achieving this target one year ahead of schedule. The Sumitomo Rubber Group is committed to ongoing efforts to work toward the solution of various social and environmental issues throughout all of our business activities so that we may actively contribute to the realization of sustainable societies.