■Purification and treatment needs surrounding water, such as water pollution in lakes and marshes, wastewater from factories, and waste liquids, are becoming increasingly diverse.

■Purification and treatment needs surrounding water, such as water pollution in lakes and marshes, wastewater from factories, and waste liquids, are becoming increasingly diverse.
Treatment equipment manufacturers generally focus on their own core technologies and develop products by applying existing technologies depending on the application.
In contrast, Karasawa Fine Co., Ltd. is attracting attention as a venture company that excels in conceptual thinking.
China has 3,671 lakes and marshes, and since the 1980s, untreated wastewater from households and factories due to urbanization has led to eutrophication, resulting in the proliferation of large amounts of phytoplankton, or blue-green algae.
One such example is the Han Chi (200 km2 in area) in Kunming City, Yunnan Province in southwestern China.
The scenic lake, which has been called "the pearl of the plateau," is now famous as a world-famous blue-green algae bloom site.
Two blue-green algae extermination systems are in operation at the Cedar Pond.
The "KROOK System" by KARASAWA FINE is the first of its kind in the world.
The Crook system incorporates a technology called counter-impact technology.
The developer, company representative director Yukihiko Karasawa, says, "Simply put, it is a technology that collides objects from both directions with the same pressure to make them uniformly smaller.
CROOK collides blue-green algae-containing water pumped by a pressurized pump with each other, destroying the blue-green algae bubbles and sheaths that surround the sheath-like bodies, which contain toxins such as microcystins.
The destroyed bubbles settle to the bottom of the water and self-destruct as they are unable to photosynthesize.
Of course, no chemicals are used.
The counter-impact technology was not developed from the beginning for the purpose of eliminating blue-green algae.
It was established as a processing technology necessary for industrial products, cosmetics, food products, and other products that require the microparticulation of materials," says Mr. Karasawa.
Karasawa Fine is a latecomer to the environmental business.
The reason for applying the technology to blue-green algae extermination equipment was as follows.
In 1999, when Mr. Karasawa was a visiting professor at Saitama University as a doctor of science, a professor in the same graduate school's environmental engineering department suggested the technology's potential for treating blue-green algae.
In 2000, Mr. Karasawa participated in a competition to demonstrate the usefulness of the technology for treating blue-green algae in Gongendo Pond in Satte City, Saitama Prefecture (an artificial regulating pond on the Tone River), using a CROOK test machine.
Eleven other companies failed to show any effect one month after the start of the experiment, but CROOK completed the treatment in about half a day," he said.
The results attracted attention from the government, but the introduction of the system was shelved due to reduced public works projects and the poor financial condition of the local government.
At that time, Mr. Zhao Feng, Secretary General of the China-Japan Environmental Friendship Center of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEP) of China, came to the rescue.
Since the two were old acquaintances, Mr. Zhao recommended the KROOK to the local authorities as a useful blue-green algae extermination device.
Mr. Karasawa also secured a budget at the Development Bank of Japan (JBIC), which encouraged him to introduce it to China.
The Chinese government invests 1 trillion yen a year in blue-green algae control in lakes and marshes, and a market of similar scale is expected in the future.
Lake Taihu is also struggling with blue-green algae control, and the city of Wuxi, located on the coast, is planning to purchase a crucian carp.
It would take about 100 of these crucifiers to clean up all the blue-green algae in Lake Taihu, and about 40 in Han Lake," he said.
The company plans to offer its business in China to local production and sales companies in the form of licensing.
The production cost of a KROOK, which can process 7 tons per minute, is 70 to 80 million yen in Japan, but local production costs only about 30 million yen.
If the selling price is 80 million yen, it is a price line that the local market will buy.
■The combination of core technology and existing technology is often a company's basic policy, but the quintessence of its development capability is probably its way of thinking.
Sometimes it is important to change the way of thinking and respond to needs without sticking to core technologies.
A good example is the "Bannen System" developed for a Wakayama-based umeboshi processing manufacturer.
Due to stricter regulations of the London Convention in April 2007, it is no longer possible to dump used seasoning liquid into the ocean, nor can it be discharged directly into the drainage system.
The manufacturer therefore considered the introduction of Nulleassen.
Although the results of a test of the treatment of liquid waste samples were positive, the initial cost of 100 million yen was a major obstacle to the introduction of the Nulleassen system.
However, after careful investigation, he found that used seasoning liquids contain a large amount of salt, sugar, amino acids, and other ingredients that are too good to throw away.
Vannen is a technology that mixes used seasoning solution with citric acid precipitate to first remove pigments, then heats and extracts salt at a temperature that makes the salt crystallize as large as possible, and extracts sugars and amino acids in the form of syrup at the same temperature.
The recovery rate is over 90%.
This technology was born from the idea of "just thinking about it and making it," but the key to this technology is the temperature control, and surprisingly, there is no precedent for a similar technology.
There are about 400 umeboshi manufacturers in Wakayama, and the two major oligopoly companies have introduced salt extraction equipment from major manufacturers using ion-exchange membranes.
However, they say it is expensive and the extraction efficiency is poor.
With Vannen, a 12-hour, 1,000-liter treatment costs 18 million yen, and the cost can be further reduced if small- and medium-sized umeboshi processing makers use the system jointly.
Karasawa says humbly, "If you unravel the technology, it's just Columbus' egg," but as he says, "If ordinary people think A→B→C, I think A→S→Z.
Even if you do, it takes time and money before you can put it to practical use.
It is easy to apply already established technology as is.
However, in our case, the way we gather and combine existing technologies necessary for our core technology is somewhat different from other companies," he said.
Currently, most of the equipment is related to water treatment, but there is a wide range of areas of environmental improvement where counter-collision technology can be applied.
For example, coal ash, which is currently used only as a raw material for cement, can be separated to extract high-purity iron and ceramics, thereby expanding the scope of recycling.
This is one of Karasawa's research themes.
I always have 40 different ideas for applications of counter-impact technology that meet the needs of the world," he says.