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Increased demand:
Land of rising sun proposes new uses for struggling gold
TOKYO: As the Japanese struggle to come to terms with a sliding economy, gold as an ornament features less and less in their daily lives, but they are finding unique new ways of using the metal.
What they used to sprinkle on their food as a symbol of wealth in the 1980s is giving way to uses in medicine, hygiene and the environment.
While jewellery still forms the overwhelming bulk of gold demand, making up 8% of total consumption at around 3,175 tonnes, experimental uses for the metal are being welcomed by miners in the hope they will help gold's price recover from the 20-year low around US$250 an ounce set two years ago.
"We are well aware of the necessity of developing new applications for gold. We would like to sponsor researchers tackling this challenging job," said Itsuo Toshima, regional director of industry-funded gold promotion body, the World Gold Council.
Pain treatment: As a treatment for muscular pain, Japanese bullion house Tokuriki Honten Co has developed an oval-shaped textile sticker with gold and titanium powder mixed into an adhesive.
The coin-size sticker, containing three milligrams of gold and 20 milligrams of titanium, can be put on the neck, back, shoulders or anywhere there is pain or muscle stiffness.
The metals emit an electric stimulus of 150-460 millivolt and this helps the body regain the balance of positive and negative ions in the body fluid, said Tokuriki's director Shigeyasu Naruse.
"Fatigue and stiffness of muscle is caused by the increase of positive ions in the body fluid which leads to interruption in the circulation of blood," Naruse said. "Our product corrects the imbalance of ions, using an electric stimulus from outside."
Naruse said an electric current flows between gold and titanium because of the difference in their electric potential.
A pack of 12 stickers sells for 500 yen (US$4.10) and last year product shipment was worth 30 million yen, Naruse said.
Pollutant cleanser: Metals often serve as catalysts because they speed up chemical reactions without being consumed in the process, but gold has not been so widely used.
But now researchers at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology have come up with a catalytic use for gold as a deodoriser.
The institute's Dr Masatake Haruta discovered in 1983 that gold exhibits catalytic properties once it is reduced into minute particles--five billionth of a metre in diameter--and deposited as hemispherical particles on certain metal oxides.
Unlike other catalytic metals such as platinum and palladium, gold catalysts are active at low temperatures and are activated by moisture, suggesting gold can be used to clean air at places like hospitals and offices, Haruta said.
Haruta also developed integrated catalysts made of gold, platinum and iridium that decompose dioxins into harmless gases.
Dioxins--which are emitted by incinerators--are potent carcinogens that can disrupt the immune, hormonal and reproductive systems of the human body.
"We hope the integrated catalysts will be put into practical use within two to three years for the removal of dioxins from the outlet gases of incinerators," Haruta said.
Odour-eater: In arguably one of the gold's most bizarre new uses, Japan's consumer electronics giant Matsushita Electric Industrial Co has been selling since 1992 an electric toilet seat equipped with a gold-carrying device which kills smells.
The seat starts functioning when a person sits on it, starting a built-in fan that blows air to a deodorisation device on the back of the seat.
The seat washes and dries the lower part of the body after excretion, and turns off one minute after a person leaves it.
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