Chemist takes recycling to higher
level

Yozo Ishizuka turns egg shells into $25-dollar-a-jar skin cream and transforms sardine
scales into air freshener.

No, he’s not a magician, but a chemist from Japan who offered some valuable tips for
local recyclers during a recent visit to B.C. to practice his English. During his stay, he met
with faculty and students in the Math and Science Department at Douglas College.

To Ishizuka, recycling means more than just turning old plastic bottles into new plastic
bottles. What’s important, he says, is finding new and creative ways to make money
through recycling to ensure the industry grows.

“Egg shells are
something of no value,
but if you find a way
that a business can use
them to make a profit
then you’ re giving
companies an
incentive to recycle,”
he says. “To do this,
you must look at the
chemistry of things to
see what you can use
them for.”

Like those eggs, for
instance. Ishizuka
noted that the thin
membranes we peel
off and discard
actually contain
collagen proteins that
can be processed into a
skin moisturizer. The
result is Ovo cream,
which has now been
selling briskly in Japan
for more than a year.

Ishzuka’s
inquisitive nature also
took the challenge of
finding a use for
sardine scales that
Japanese fisherman
scrape off their nets.
He found the scales

Chemist Yozo Ishizuka with a jar of Ovo, a skin cream he contain calcium which

invented made from discarded egg shells. is now separated and
used as abrasive

material in toothpaste.
The scales
themselves, as we all know, are very good at retaining natural aromas. Ishzuka found that
by processing the scales and letting them soak up scent from pine needles or mint, the end
product was a long-lasting fragrant potpourri. Similarly, he developed ways to convert
seashells into artists’ paint and bark mulch into gas and water filters.

When he is not pondering new ways to recycle, Ishizuka teaches chemistry at the
Technical High School in Yonago City and is also a guest researcher at the College of
Analytical Chemistry in Osaka. He is also a recycling consultant with several Japanese
companies and completed his doctorate in Chemical Engineering two years ago at the
Tokyo Institute of Technology.

“T’ve been doing this for 30 years,” he says. “It is my hobby and my business.” Bf