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In August 1899, a massive landslide struck the House of Sumitomo’s copper mine in the mountains of Besshi, on Japan’s Shikoku Island, claiming over 500 victims overnight and nearly sweeping away the hilltop copper smelter. Sumitomo had been sensing the geographical limits to expansion on the mountain; so following the tragedy, the company decided to move the smelting operations to a more spacious coastal site. There it built a state-of-the-art smelter of a type used in the West. The new plant, however, gave rise to its own difficult problem: emissions of sulfur dioxide gas and the damage it caused to farms in the nearby community. This effect had not been noticeable when the copper was smelted deep in the mountains.
The Besshi Mine’s cupriferous iron sulfide deposits contained about 40% sulfur. When heat was applied to this ore during smelting, sulfur dioxide was vented into the atmosphere. Sumitomo’s work to modernize and expand the mine by opening new shafts and building a railroad increased the volume of ore smelted, exacerbating sulfur dioxide emissions and the resulting crop damage. In those days, no sulfur removal technologies of the kind we know today were available, and damage from the so-called “smoke” developed into a serious public issue.
Teigo Iba (1847-1926), General Manager of the mine at the time, decided to address the problem by relocating the modern Western-style smelter (which had been in full operation already for three years) to Shisakajima, an uninhabited island some 20 kilometers offshore. Everyone expected winds would disperse the smokestack emissions in the air above the sea, putting an end to the pollution problem on the mainland coast. The relocation was to cost the House of Sumitomo an equivalent of a year’s sales from Besshi Mine, but Iba firmly moved forward with the plan.
The Shisakajima smelter was completed in 1904. But when operations began, everyone was shocked to see the noxious gas arrive all the way to the main island, landing on an even wider area than before. Contrary to Iba’s best intentions, the pollution problem worsened.
Alternative measures were immediately pursued to combat the smoke. One idea was to transform the sulfur dioxide into sulfuric acid prior to emission, and use it in turn to make calcium super-phosphate, a fertilizer. This seemed to kill two birds with one stone: it would both stop the immediate problem of smoke emissions and provide farmers with an inexpensive fertilizer.
Calcium super-phosphate was already well known among farmers as a manmade fertilizer, but from a business point of view it was a commodity extremely vulnerable to market fluctuations because of war and economic instability. For this reason, some members of the House of Sumitomo thought the plan was too speculative and risky. Nonetheless, the management finally decided to enter the fertilizer business by producing sulfuric acid, having concluded that solving the emission problem was Sumitomo’s top priority. In September 1913, Sumitomo Fertilizer Manufacturing was formed with a staff of just nine people.
This was the origin of Sumitomo Chemical.
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Samples of the Besshi Mine
Samples of the Besshi Mine’s cupriferous iron sulfide ore, which contained about 40% sulfur. The sample at right was extracted in 1892. |
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