A Peachtree City manufacturing facility has received a national award for reducing its use of water, electricity and two other components of its manufacturing process.

TDK Components USA received the National Performance Track award from the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

TDK was lauded for reducing its water usage by 1.1 million gallons and reducing its electrical use by 1 million megawatts. The company also changed its manufacturing processes to cut its use of caustic soda by more than half and also decrease its use of copper paste by 36 percent.

The company produces multilayer ceramic capacitors that are used in a variety of electronic devices, from cell phones to automobile components such as air bags and engine control systems. The capacitors are tiny flecks, stored on rolls of plastic so they can be punched out by machines on assembly lines for circuit boards.

Cellphones have up to 200 capacitors each and auto instruments can have between 100 and 200, officials said. The factory produces as many as one billion capacitors per month, selling them to a variety of clients, including Delphi, Delco and Motorola.

EPA Region 4 Administrator Jimmy Palmer noted that the electricity savings removed 700 tons of carbon dioxide emissions from the environment that is produced at power plants.

The changes didn’t just help TDK improve the environment, either, noted company president Fuji Masatoshi.

“It reduced our running cost,” Masatoshi said, noting the improvements were in part led by TDK’s parent company headquartered in Japan.

The company started up in Peachtree City in 1986 and was best known for producing audio tapes and CDs in its early years.

The capacitors currently produced at TDK are designed to store an electrical charge and are used on circuit boards for electronic products. Much of the company’s business is tied to the auto industry.

TDK has 177 employees today, but at its peak several years ago it employed around 300 people, but that was before the tech bubble burst, Takekawa said. The plant runs 24 hours a day, six days a week.

The plant receives the ceramic base for the capacitors from Japan, coating them with tin, copper and nickel during the production process. The tiny capacitors are tested in automated machines and also inspected by humans using microscopes before they are approved for packaging to be sold to customers.

Much of the company’s electrical savings came from eliminating a warehouse. TDK also installed energy efficient light fixtures and used improved technology to speed up processes to also save electricity, said TDK’s Larry Tyler.

Takekawa pointed out one machine on the production line that’s used to clean off the conductors. Previously, the conductors were flushed with running water, but the new process features standing water as the conductors are agitated in the water to clean them, Takekawa said.

TDK also dramatically reduced the flow of water in other plant processes, conducting multiple tests to see how much water could be saved without affecting product quality, Takekawa added.

The company also has its own water treatment plant on-site to eliminate metals from the water, returning it to the city’s sewer treatment system cleaner than it was when it entered the building from the county water system, TDK officials said.

Some of the smaller but still effective measures to cut electricity at TDK included a program to shut off light switches in rooms that aren’t used much. The program was dubbed by an employee as the “Flip it off” campaign, Takekawa said.

“TDK has stepped way beyond compliance,” Palmer said, noting that the designation from EPA allows less paperwork to be required of the company in terms of environmental regulations. “This was a company decision at the highest level ... TDK decided to be a good citizen.”

Palmer noted that only four facilities in the entire country won this award.

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