Japan accounts for nearly 40 of the world's railroad passengers

The JR East railway company serves an area that includes eastern Honshu (Japanes main island) and extends northwards to Aomori prefecture. We have about 7,500 kilometers of track in service. We have about 72,000 people working in some capacity for the railroad, and 1,700 stations. Including the Shinkansen bullet train, there are about 13,000 railroad cars in daily use running on our tracks. If we count all our passengers, from those who travel only from one station to the next on the line to those traveling as far as Aomori and Hachinohe, 1.6 million people use our railway lines during the course of one day.

The total number of people using railways all over the world in the course of a day is about 160 million. That is, if we include Europe, Africa and so on, the total number of passengers is at about this level. Thus, JR East is serving about ten percent of the railway passengers in the whole world Ð this is partly because we serve the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, an extremely large concentration of people. Passengers using railways in Japan besides JR East number about 4.41 million; and so taken together Japanese railways account for nearly 40 percent of railway passenger use in the world.

In considering JR East and the environment, we need to go back and take a look at what kind of issues are relevant for us as a railroad. Firstly, there is the issue of energy used in operating the trains, and in managing facilities on the lines, such as stations, etc. This is one important way trains relate to the environment. Another very significant issue for us in the environmental context is the garbage discarded by passengers, who do spend considerable lengths of time in the trains and stations. Another issue involves the maintenance necessary to keep certain features of our infrastructure in use over a long period of time; we need to use various types of material to replace or repair our equipment, and wastes are generated in the process.

We also have the issue of noise from railroads. High speed trains in Europe and elsewhere run through rural areas, but in Japan they run through residential districts, and so there are problems of noise, particularly in relation to the Shinkansen bullet trains. There is also the theme of protecting the environment along tracks, and how we should deal with track-side groves of trees and other scenery.

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Progress in the development and introduction of energy-saving railroad cars

One specific example of our environment-related activities involves energy conservation and reducing carbon dioxide emissions. An important part of this effort is the development and introduction of energy-saving railroad cars. We plan to have 80 percent of our railroad cars energy-saving models by 2005. We already achieved 63 percent as of the end of 2001, and plan to continue replacing cars in this way. Another issue involves so-called "zero emissions." As we work to reduce the amount of garbage, etc. overall, we also perform further sorting of garbage discarded by passengers at our recycling centers. The sorted waste is compressed and enters the general recycled waste stream. For example, tickets are recycled into toilet paper, used newspapers from stations are recycled into copy paper and fibers from PET bottles are used in the cloth for uniforms. Fibers from glass go into tiles that are used in artificial ground seen, for example, at Ueno Station in Tokyo. We also recycle the ticket machines.

If we take the energy use of the "Kokuden" national electric commuter train service of 30 years ago as 100 percent, the 209 and the E231 series of cars that have been recently introduced to the Yamanote Line and the new Keihin-Tohoku Line use 47 percent of that energy. That is, the trains are now able to carry the passengers using less than half the energy. In an interim phase at about the time the national railways were being privatized, the 205 series of cars ran on about two-thirds (66 percent) of that energy.

So, what was done to these cars to achieve this? One thing was to make them lighter. One of the ways we did this was to change from using steel to stainless steel. If we liken the past method for building the old type of railroad car to traditional Japanese house construction, starting with a foundation, raising a stout frame and so on to the final painting of the walls, the new method we devised as another way to make cars lighter was to build them with firmly attached panels in a kind of two-by-four construction style. Another aspect that has a close connection with something we will talk about later is that we can now control more powerful motors, so in order to operate a commuter train made up of ten cars, whereas formerly out of the 10 cars we needed 6 with motors, now we only need 4 with motors, because they are using more powerful motors. This means that the amount of machinery required has been reduced, resulting in a lighter train overall. We have been able to reduce the total weight of the train as a whole by a little more than 30 percent. Various other measures have also been devised to lighten the cars.

We have also been able to introduce regenerative brakes. Driving a train is just like driving an automobile. When you are driving fast and want to stop, you do not immediately use the mechanical brakes, but instead use electric brakes in a way that corresponds to downshifting in the case of an automobile. To get an image of what these electric brakes are like, think of the dynamo used on a bicycle to power its headlight. In fact, the motor used to drive the train is passively rotated by the running of the wheel, and as a result electricity is generated. And when that electricity is used in some form, this actually creates electrical resistance, which acts as a brake. This kind of braking is used at rather high speeds. And, finally the mechanical brakes are applied to suppress the train's movement and this stops the train. In the past, the electricity generated in this way was not usable, and had to be dispersed into the air through a resistor.

However, regenerative brakes can control this electricity through a system that mediates it through a pantograph and supplies it to other trains operating in the vicinity. The trains create electricity in order to stop themselves, and that electricity is sent back through the pantograph to the aerial wires over the tracks, from whence it can supply other trains, etc., in the vicinity that are using electricity, resulting in efficient electricity use. That is, up to about 20 percent of the energy from a running train can now be returned to other trains.

The newest VVVF control systems use semiconductors to enable them to utilize high-voltage currents of 15,000 V, and systems that can use this kind of high voltage current by effectively controlling it with semiconductors have been introduced into the industry and are being used as the norm. We can now control these currents, and although formerly the electrical resistance was converted to voltage and ended up being dispersed into the air as heat, these currents can now be controlled more carefully and with fewer losses by using semiconductors. Looking at all these factor taken together, we have been able to reduce our electricity use by over 50 percent. To put it more simply, based on the assumption of ten cars per train, one train has been able to save enough electricity to power 800 ordinary households. In the case of JR East, this kind of system was being put into practice at the time our cars were going through a transition period, and have contributed a great deal to energy conservation.

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Our own electric power plants supply 56 percent of our electricity

Of the total of 1.6 million passengers JR East carries, 1.2 to 1.3 million of them are in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, including those who ride the morning and evening commuter trains, and we consume a huge amount of energy in this service. In particular, we use an extremely large amount of energy during the morning hours between 8 and 9 o'clock, and around the hour of 6 o'clock in the evening. In this context, in the past we built our own electric power plants, and at the present time we still own power plants. We have the Shinano River hydroelectric power plant, and in Kawasaki a thermal electric power plant consisting of four generating units. All of these burn gas and/or kerosene to produce electricity. Here I am counting only electricity, but even if oil use were added in, I don't think the ratios would be all that different. As opposed to oil use, most of the energy that we use is in the form of electricity, and 56 percent of the electricity we use is from our own power plants. The remaining 44 percent we purchase, in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area from Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), and in the Tohoku district from the Tohoku Electric Power Company. In the Tohoku district we are operating mostly on purchased electricity, and I think you can assume that the power we generate at our power plants is being used in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area.

Thus, in the context of owning our own power plants, we are trying to determine how to use that energy more efficiently and how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from that energy use. One example is that we have been updating our four thermal generating units over the last twenty-odd years, and during such renewals we have introduced compound steam/gas turbine electricity generating equipment. Our image of how electricity was generated in the past, is basically a boiler generating steam that turns a steam turbine to generate electricity, but with our upgraded equipment, a gas turbine is deployed first to directly generate electricity. The heat generated from this process is then used to produce steam, which then generates electricity with steam-powered turbines. Our former electricity generation efficiency rate was a little over 30 percent, but our present electricity generating efficiency is up to levels of over 40 percent.

Another thing I would like to mention is that what we call the Central Electricity Command monitors the daily extent of train operations in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, and while giving a certain amount of consideration to environmental impacts, they examine how much water is available to the Shinano River hydropower plant on the next day and how much electricity can be generated. While looking at the next day's forecasts for weather, temperature and so on, and taking into consideration the season and other conditions predicted for the next day, they estimate how much electricity will be needed. They can make these estimates based on a great accumulation of experience built up over the years, and by producing these estimates, they can manage the operation of the Shinano hydropower plant and the four thermal generating units. They put together and execute a plan that takes into consideration how much electricity will be purchased from TEPCO, how much our own plants will produce, how much will be used, and so on. Our efforts to use energy efficiently and reduce carbon dioxide go one further than other companies in our sector.

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Toilet paper in train stations is made from recycled tickets

Now I would like to talk about wastes. The annual volume of garbage generated from trains and stations amounts to 51,000 tons. A simple comparison shows that this rivals the amount produced by a city of 130,000 inhabitants. We started measuring these wastes in 1994, and at that time we were only recycling about 14 percent.

Our present goal is to recycle 40 percent, and our efforts are going along smoothly enough, though we still have some minor issues. There is still no recycling system in some areas, because, depending on the district, no recycling companies can be found to purchase the material and so there is nothing to do but discard it.

In this context, we introduced the practice of sorting waste into three categories in 1994. By 1995, sorting waste into three categories was universal within the company. I think that ours was the first company that manages facilities used by a large number of people to start asking patrons to sort their garbage. To raise the level of our sorting efforts so that the wastes could enter the general stream of recycled materials, we established a recycling center at Ueno Station. We subsequently established centers at Shin-Kiba and Ohmiya.

So, what happens to the garbage from trains and stations? They are sorted into three categories: 1) cans, glass bottles and PET bottles, 2) newspapers and magazines, and 3) other, and these are further sorted into 5 categories. Taking the Tokyo Metropolitan Area as our example, we have the Ueno and Ohmiya recycling centers where cans, glass bottles and PET bottles are stockpiled. Most of this waste material has already been sorted, but it is sorted again using, for example, spiral electric current, magnets and wind, although the final sorting has to be done by hand, yielding steel cans, aluminum cans and PET bottles, which are crushed and compressed. In this form they can be released into ordinary recycling channels. Newspapers and magazines go through a similar sorting process at the Shin-Kiba recycling center, where they are compressed and baled by a mechanical press, and then taken to paper manufacturing plants. In the last analysis, about thirty-odd percent of this waste (over 40 percent for Tokyo) enters the recycled waste stream.

Ueno and Ohmiya together deal with about 5,700 tons of cans, glass bottles and PET bottles. That is not the total for the whole Tokyo Metropolitan Area, but just for central Tokyo in the vicinity of the Yamanote Line. Last year our result for recycling PET bottles was over 120 tons.

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99 Percent material recycling possible for railroad cars

I would like to move on to the topic of recycling railroad cars, and take the Shinkansen bullet trains as my example. The Tohoku Shinkansen bullet train service was opened for business twenty years ago, and the initial railroad cars, called the 200 series, are being progressively replaced with a new type of car of which the "Hayate" car is representative. As I believe I may have mentioned, train cars are overhauled at a pace of once every two or three years, and they undergo equipment checks every few weeks or months, in which expendable parts are replaced, etc. That is not to say that there are no areas where cars are used for several decades, but these areas are very limited. Even so, maintenance takes time and effort, and our passengers will not accept older trains with no air conditioning, or with seats that are hard benches which do not recline, so, when a certain level is reached, maintenance places a considerable burden on our resources. We also risk falling behind the times, so on a cycle of 20 to 20-plus years we replace our cars. In the case of the Shinkansen, we cannot make the switch all at once, so, starting from 2 or 3 years ago, some cars are being retired a little bit early, and some at a slower pace.

Ninety-nine percent material recycling is possible. The figures are by weight, so perhaps even higher percentages are possible, but for iron it is 57 percent. The bodies of our company's Shinkansen cars are all aluminum, so we have of course aluminum, copper scrap, stainless scrap and a certain amount of mixed scrap. The one part that is left over includes broken glass, material produced by shredders, material used for insulation and so on, but this is what we have. With the awareness that we should make the next generation of cars so that these kinds of things are not produced, we are going forward, adopting new cars that will have a higher rate of recyclability. Ninety-two percent of the metals and whatnot have been entering the material recycling stream.

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Zero-emission, energy-saving railroad car construction

And also, re-use. We do not completely replace cars, even in the case of the Shinkansen. This is not feasible because of economic concerns and the time it would take for the work. When we speak of re-use, we are talking about upgrading cars and remodeling them. We do the remodeling work ourselves, and you can assume that most of it is remodeling of facilities used directly by passengers, to make the interior of the cars more up-to-date, that is, re-using the cars by re-fitting them with passenger facilities that are nicer and more suited to our present lifestyles. And, of course when we do discard railroad cars, the materials are released into the ordinary recycled-material stream. In fact, we send some parts to an electric furnace facility we own in Nagano prefecture, where some of the iron is melted down and supplied to our plants in Niitsu City in Niigata prefecture, etc., and converted into parts used in maintenance work on the Shinkansen, etc., some of which we manufacture ourselves. That is, we have internalized some of the material cycle route within the company, and, as we have started manufacturing cars at the Niitsu facility, we can command a large-scale cycle. At the same time, as I mentioned earlier, cars can now run on less than 50 percent of the energy they used formerly, but is this really enough? We are now undertaking research and development on how we can reduce the waste generated, and how to make railroad cars that use even less energy, employing an engineering viewpoint that takes in the entire life cycle of railroad cars and other equipment.

Of the 13,000 trains that we run, about 400 and some dozen cars in rural districts and elsewhere are equipped with diesel engines. Things have changed quite a bit, but if we travel on rural lines, for example the Koumi Line not far from here, we will find diesel engines. They look and run very much like electric trains, but unfortunately they are still running on diesel. These diesel engines in themselves are being made more energy-efficient, and in fact now conserve 20 percent of the energy they used in the past. However, we want to progress beyond that, and so we are making hybrid engines. We have built an experimental hybrid system, which utilizes exactly the same technology as electric trains. They run on motors just like electric trains. We are designing them to use the diesel engine to generate electricity and run on that electricity.

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Making the railways easier to use with Park & Ride

It is important for railroads to be convenient to use. So far I have talked a lot about what we are doing about specific factors. But, one way of looking at it is, how can we make railroads easy to use? It is important that you do not need bring a lot of stuff with you when you make a trip. I spoke briefly about automobiles before, but, if we ask, "Can we use the railroad without using automobiles," the answer is, "In rural Japan there is no way to get to a Shinkansen station without using an automobile." And if you are going anywhere in rural Japan, when you get to the station there, you need a rental car or some other means to get to your final destination. So, with respect to how we can effectively tie these things together, we need to ask how to make the railways easy to use as a travel commodity. And so, to make it easy for people to travel without luggage, we have a system of discounts to encourage the intelligent use of parcel post delivery services. We have also set up Park & Ride parking lots, and to encourage ease of use in a broader sense, we are making it easier for people who have declined to travel by installing elevators and escalators. From the point of view of people who do not often travel by train, one inconvenience is looking up and paying fares. To those who think, "What a hassle; let's just take the car," we say, "You can get to your destination without having to look up and calculate the fare. And it is easier to rent a car once you get there. " We feel it is our job to offer convenient services that take all the needs of the traveler into consideration.

Lastly, we have 4,400 hectares of trackside forests (a thousand times more area than Tokyo National Stadium. In one sense, we feel that the 6 million trees in these forests are there to protect our tracks from snowstorms. I think that this is the departure point for our approach to the environment. Also, we have carried out annual tree-planting activities together with local people 11 times in the last ten years at 121 locations, and these events have involved about 23,000 people and resulted in the planting of 210,000 trees. We also operate "Eco-Train" and hold children's events to popularize these things.

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