No. 146: Latest Japanese achievements for global environment (October 16, 2015)

Technology:

Latest Japanese achievements for global environment were released. The grand champion is, of course, Toyota’s fuel cell vehicle “Mirai (the future),” and it is followed by various epoch-making technologies to preserve global environment. Mirai has already received a total of more than 3,000 units by the end of August this year for the domestic market alone. It is priced at about 7 million yen now, though it cost 100 million yen to build a prototype model in 2008. Toyota is scheduled to increase the annual production capacity from 700 units at present to 3,000 units in 2017.

Research Institute for Humanity and Nature developed a technology to increase crop yields by preventing the soil from being eroded. The new technology creates fallow soil about 5 meters wide in the farmland where no seeds are planted and no weeds are eradicated. Because soil and organic substances are blown to the fallow soil, crop yields of the entirely farmland increases by changing the place of the fallow soil every year. The experiment conducted in Niger of Africa, the new technology decreased wind erosion by about 70% and increased crop yields by 30-80%. It does not need much investment, and it greatly contributes to increasing food production in regions suffering from poverty.  

Taisei Corporation developed a technology to purify water polluted water of industrial water disposal facilities and industrial effluent treatment facilities with the help of bacteria found in the soil in alliance with Osaka University and Kitasato University. The new technology efficiently dissolves 1,4-Dioxane that is hard to eliminate and supposed to pose a health risk. It can decrease the maintenance cost by 80% and input energy by 60% than the method that uses an oxidant. The experiment to prove the performance of this technology proved that it can maintain the ability to keep the concentration of polluted groundwater at lower than the environmental standard for three months.

Railway Technical Research Institute developed a superconductive cable that can reduce energy consumption by 5%. It succeeded in the test run this year using an existing railway line.

 A greening project in a desert by a private company in Kobe

  The future society to be realized by superconductive cables

No. 145: Urban mine is growing its presence as a source of rare metals (April18, 2015)

Technology:

Since the law to purchase renewable energy at a fixed price was enacted in 2012, photovoltaic generation has been growing popular quite rapidly. A solar panel has a life between 20 and 30 years. The Ministry of the Environment estimates that used photovoltaic generation equipment will amount up to 700,000 tons in 2030. A solar battery contains various metals including rare metals like iridium and has the possibility of becoming prospect in the future.  

DOWA Holdings has been developing technologies to recover metals like gold, silver, and copper from black ores since the Meiji Period, and it is working on solar panels to establish a technology to recycle them with a view to recovering rare metals. It is urgent and important to establish a recycling technology to eliminate a large amount of used solar panels to be thrown away for land reclamation. Urban mine is a very important source of metals. The Institute of Metal Sciences reckons that urban mine in Japan is estimated to have more than 10% of world’s reserves of such metals as gold, silver, tin, and iridium.

Tantalum, for example, is a rare metal. Mitsui Kinzoku Recycle is developing a technology to recover tantalum from tantalum capacitors in collaboration with National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. The technology is to separate capacitors from electronic substrates and recover tantalum at a high purity utilizing the difference of specific gravity. The company is scheduled to start commercial production of tantalum in 2016.

Ricoh and Japan Future Eco-Systems are jointly developing a technology to change waste plastics not to resin materials but to oil. They heat waste plastics to 600-800 degrees centigrade in an iron container, and recover heating oil and heavy oil from vaporized substance. They are in the middle of putting this technology into practical application. Ricoh is receiving inquiries on this technology from Southeast Asian countries and confident of spreading this technology worldwide.

The Japanese domestic recycling market is estimated at 7 trillion yen and supposed to grow further thanks to technological innovation that increases recoverable amount and expands the products subject to recycling.

 Exploring urban mines

Rare metal selection equipment (1)

Rare metal selection equipment (2)