The Future of Water Opened Up by a New Adsorbent Made from Natural Wood Treated at High Temperatures: The Challenge of the Yaizu City Industrial Research Institute (January 1997)

The Future of Water Opened Up by a New Adsorbent Made from Natural Wood Treated at High Temperatures: The Challenge of the Yaizu City Industrial Research Institute (January 1997)
In Japan in the 1990s, the safety of tap water was at the center of social concern, and groundwater contamination and trihalomethane production were reported daily. Against this backdrop, the high-temperature treated wood adsorbent developed by the Yaizu City Industrial Research Institute attracted great expectations as a new water purification material to replace conventional activated carbon. By carbonizing natural wood such as Japanese cypress at about 900 degrees Celsius, micropores are highly developed and adsorption performance is improved. This material showed strong adsorption effects against trihalomethane, which was feared to be carcinogenic, and trichloroethylene, which was a nationwide source of groundwater contamination, and attracted attention as an environmental technology that could be introduced by local governments.
This development was also highly significant as an effort to revalue wood as an environmental material at a time when the price of domestic lumber was stagnant and the problem of underutilization of thinned lumber was becoming more serious. High-temperature treated wood requires relatively low energy to produce and has a low environmental impact at the time of disposal, which was in line with the trend toward environmentally conscious materials that spread in the 1990s. Currently, wood carbide is used in a wide range of applications, including water purification, VOC removal, and odor countermeasures, and the Yaizu City research can be regarded as an important achievement that paved the way for the initial stage of such applications.