Technological development for turning marine resources into raw materials that can be used for industrial purposes is sprouting in various industrial fields.

Technological development for turning marine resources into raw materials that can be used for industrial purposes is sprouting in various industrial fields.
In order for Japan to become self-sufficient in biomass resources from its limited land area, marine resources are becoming more important than ever before.
Despite having a world-class economic zone area, Japan relies on overseas procurement for many of its marine resources, and many of these resources are being affected by international market conditions.
Attention is now focusing on marine resources for material uses, such as oil substitutes, resins, and nonferrous metals, which can be used as industrial raw materials.
Seawater - Review Needed Due to High International Market PricesSalt, a representative industrial raw material that can be extracted from seawater, is produced annually worldwide at a rate of approximately 200 million tons, of which approximately two-thirds is rock salt and the remainder is refined from sea salt.
Salt is one of the marine resources that Japan can procure 100% domestically.
The supply capacity of salt for food use is more than 1.3 million tons compared to the annual domestic production demand of approximately 1.1 million tons, making the self-sufficiency rate practically over 100%.
On the other hand, the Zoda industry consumes more than 7 million tons annually, all of which is imported from Mexico and Australia.
The price of salt is also being dragged down by the price of coal for refining and transportation costs.
Since the price of salt is low for its weight, fuel costs for transportation account for most of the cost.
There is ample room for increased domestic production of salt to be considered.
Seawater contains magnesium, bromine, iodine, lithium, gold, silver, and other elements in addition to oxygen and hydrogen, which are its main components.
Hideki Furuyanaka and his colleagues at Kyoto University have developed a material that can adsorb and recover gold contained in extremely small amounts in liquids such as seawater.
Conventional solvent extraction is limited to concentrations of a few ppm, but using nanosized R-type manganese dioxide, they have made it possible to recover gold at the level of approximately 1 ppb.
After adsorption, only the gold is recovered by applying hydrochloric acid, and the material can be used repeatedly. Forward Science Laboratory (Kyoto City), a venture company of the university, plans to market the product.
Magnesium, the raw material for alloys, has been at a high price for the first time in three years since the beginning of 2007.
The recent price hike of the industrial raw material, which can be substituted with marine resources, is partly due to the high costs involved in transportation and manufacturing.
Establishing a technology to extract industrial raw materials from seawater is significant for controlling cost fluctuation factors.

Seaweeds - Characteristics - Commercialization is progressing due to the wide range of utilization.
Japan's domestic self-sufficiency rate for fish and shellfish is approximately 50%.
Most of it is used for food, but it is also a biomass resource that can be applied as an industrial raw material.
Seaweeds, for example, contain potassium, which was extracted as a raw material for gunpowder in ancient times, and iodine, which is necessary today as a raw material for LCD TVs and solar cell films, in very small quantities.
In the future, alginic acid contained in kelp is expected to be used as a new resin material.
Alginic acid, which is used as a thickening and stabilizing agent in foods, is a substance consisting of two types of sugar linked in a chain, and belongs to the same polysaccharide family as starch.
Alginic acid is the fiber that gives seaweed its unique slimy texture. 30~60% by weight can be extracted from dried kelp, and the remainder is processed into feedstuffs.
Toshiba developed a biodegradable buffer material based on alginic acid in 2006.
The material consists of a 60% aqueous solution of alginic acid reacted with alcohol, a 30% biodegradable plasticizer, and a surfactant.
The material has the same performance as foamed polyurethane, which could not be achieved with conventional corn-derived buffer materials, has excellent resilience, and hardly changes at 75°C, the temperature at which existing biodegradable buffer materials shrink.
Used products can be reused by dissolving them in water and extracting the raw materials, and the performance of recycled products is the same as that of new products.
The company plans to put the product to practical use by the end of 2001, and to use it on a trial basis within the company for packaging.
Some companies are taking advantage of the characteristics of agar to enter the production of bioplastics.
Ina Shokuhin Kogyo (Ina City, Nagano Prefecture), a major agar manufacturer, plans to further develop applications for its edible film "Dragonfly Spring," which is currently being produced at its Fujisawa Plant (Ina City, Nagano Prefecture) as a food container material.
In addition to being soluble in cold and warm water and biodegradable, the film has superior gas-barrier properties compared to other packaging materials, and can be heat-sealed to form bags and printed with photographs and illustrations, making it competitive with bioplastics and other general-purpose packaging materials in terms of function.
In addition to the cosmetics field, the company is exploring the use of this material in electronic materials and daily sundries.
Seaweed is also a promising raw material for ethanol.
In March, a research group formed by Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, Mitsubishi Research Institute, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Shimizu Corporation, and others from various fields and industries developed a plan to mass-produce bioethanol from cultivated seaweed.
A 10,000 km2 aquaculture farm will be set up in the Yamato Dori, a shallow bay in the center of the Sea of Japan, where the highly fertile seaweed "hondawara" will be cultivated.
The harvested seaweed will be broken down into sugar in a bioreactor on board the ship, and the refined ethanol will be transported to land by tanker.
If realized, the project could cover one-third of the 60 million kiloliters of gasoline consumed in Japan each year.
The enzyme that degrades fucoidan, the main component of seaweed, has already been found, and the company plans to conduct comprehensive research on alginic acid degrading enzymes, plant development, costs, and other issues.
The main production areas of cultured comps in Japan are south of Honshu, including Kumamoto, Shimane, and Ehime.
Hokkaido kelp, which produces more than 90% of Japan's kelp, is a second-year crop, but kelp south of Honshu can be harvested in one year, and in southern Japan in six months, due to habitat conditions.
Currently, most kelp is used for food, but it will be necessary to consider expanding the amount of cultivated kelp needed for non-food use, taking into account the relationship with fishing rights.

Effective utilization methods for inedible marine products, shells, and other leftover bays have been initiated.
In the case of scallop shells, which are generated at a rate of 200,000 to 300,000 tons per year, the Aomori Prefectural Industrial Technology Center is exploring the use of scallop shells as filler material by converting them into ceramics through calcination.
The Aomori Prefectural Industrial Technology Center has developed a composite resin filler that can produce PET composite resin panels with higher strength than ordinary calcium carbonate, and Hokkaido Kyodo Lime (Tomakomai City, Hokkaido) has commercialized a rod-shaped filler for synthetic resins with excellent heat and alkaline resistance.
(Hirauchi-machi, Aomori Prefecture) and other companies, Hitachi Chemical has developed a technology to manufacture FRP again by mixing glass fibers extracted from waste FRP with resin and shell filler.
Unless properties superior to those of existing raw materials can be utilized with higher value, application development will not progress.
The scallop shell business of Chaflose Corporation (Yokohama, Japan) is noteworthy in that it has dramatically improved the market value of raw materials, from wall materials (product price: 1.7 million yen/ton) to athlete's foot treatment (150 million yen/ton), even for the same shell calcined product.
The medicinal effect cannot be obtained from any type of calcined shell, and "we were able to succeed because scallops have a unique biological mechanism.
Extraction of marine resources must be based fully on the impact on the ecosystem, but without established utilization technology, domestic procurement of resources in Japan will end in empty talk.
Material utilization of marine resources requires first a bird's-eye view of international market conditions and research on high-value raw materials.
From there, technological innovation through involvement in the chemical field will be essential.