Yokohama team acknowledged for cashew nut shell innovation

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a group of four men working for Yokohama Rubber developed a bead filler compound for high performance tyres based on polymerised cardanol, a chemical derived from liquid extracted out of cashew nut shells. Cashew based products were already in use to improve bleeding on the surface of green rubber, but the cardanol based product developed by Shineru Shinoda, Masayoshi Daio, Hideki Ishida and Tetsuji Kawazura providing an extremely high hardness after vulcanisation while at the same time keeping the viscosity of the compound low during processing. Some two decades later, on February 4, 2011, the Yokohama Rubber team’s efforts were acknowledged with their receipt of the “Mortimer T. Harvey Award 2010” from Cardolite Corporation, a leading manufacturer of cashew nutshell liquid products.

The four Yokohama men received their awards at a ceremony held at the Hilton Tokyo (Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo), which was also attended by Yokohama Rubber director and corporate officer Kinya Kawakami. Cardolite Corporation president Tony Stonis presented the award. The Mortimer T. Harvey Award is named after the man Cardolite Corporation refers to as the “father of commercial applications of cashew nutshell liquid.” Dr. Harvey characterised the chemical structure of cashew nutshell liquid in the 1920’s and 1930’s while a student at Union College in New York State and Columbia University in New York City. After finishing his graduate work, he formed Harvel Corporation to continue research into commercial applications of cashew nut shell liquid. The award named after him was first bestowed in 1998.

Following their development work, Shinoda, Daio, Ishida and Kawazura were named as the inventors of the new product in the Japanese patent application of October 8, 1991 and were granted a US patent on November 30, 1993. The Yokohama Rubber team are the first to win a Mortimer T. Harvey Award for a product specifically intended for tyre industry use; Yokohama Rubber states that the award recognises its “achievement in developing, patenting and commercialising technology using cashew nutshell liquid products about 20 years ago and in utilising this technology for the last 20 years to contribute to the preservation of the environment and the development of the cashew nutshell liquid industry.

Cardolite Corporation is a US-based company that traces its origins back to Dr. Harvey. Following his importation of the first commercial quantity of cashew nut shell liquid into the US in 1926 and identifying the commercial potential of the substance’s substituted alkenyl phenol chemical structure, Harvey’s company, Harvel, entered into a joint venture with Irvington Varnish and Insulator Company to further explore and develop commercial uses for the liquid. The first of these was cashew friction particle for the brake lining industry, a product first released in 1930. Irvington was acquired by 3M Company in 1953, and over the next decades cardanol was applied to a whole range of automotive and other uses. In 1985 the cashew nut shell liquid business and its factory in Newark, New Jersey were acquired from 3M by a management buyout. The newly-formed corporation was named “Cardolite” after Irvington’s original trade name for the product.