Japan village turns 40,000 tonnes of discarded scallop shells into stronger safety helmets

Sarufutsu, a village on the northernmost tip of Japan's Hokkaido, is known for scallops. The village contributes to about 15% of the country's entire scallop catch, and Japan eats tens of thousands of tons of the sweet, sashimi-grade shellfish. However, what people consume is the muscle, not the shell.The shells are nothing more than waste and gather up to become a mountain that needs to be dealt with. Every year, roughly 40,000 tons of empty scallop shells pile up around the village as processing waste. When overseas export of the shells slowed after 2021, the building mounds had nowhere to go.Unlike plastic that remains lifeless on the ground, the scallop shells can leach and contaminate the soil, turning the village's signature industry into a looming environmental problem. Then, a plastic company looked at the heaps and wondered if they could become raw material for something.The birth of 'Shellstic'The idea came from the shell's original life purpose, which is to protect the animal inside from predators and the sea. Its main forming component is calcium carbonate, a hard and abundant material. Koushi Chemical Industry, which was building on bioplastic techniques from Osaka Uni...