New Challenges to Hevea Rubber growers

Dr N Yogaratnam

It was NR from Hevea Brasiliensis and now from Russian dandelion and guayule. Will this be an additional challenge to Hevea rubber growers?

Hevea Rubber

Brazil provided the world with the rubber tree, Hevea Brasiliensis, but that country no longer plays any significant part in the world NR (natural rubber) trade. Seeds were exported from the lower Amazon area of Brazil to London UK by Henry Wickham, a local planter acting for the British Government in 1876.

The seeds were germinated at the Tropical Herbarium in Kew Gardens, London later that year. From there seedlings were exported to Ceylon (Now Sri Lanka). In 1877, 22 seedlings were sent from Ceylon to Singapore, where they grew strongly, and the technique of tapping was developed. Prior to this, the trees had to be felled before the latex could be extracted.

By 1900, most of the techniques and agricultural practices required to establish large plantations had been developed. One key technique was bud grafting. This is essentially a cloning technique which ensures that genetically identical trees can be produced in unlimited numbers.The rubber industry often talks about high-yielding clones, or other types of clone; and this is the basis of that terminology.

Over the next 40 years or so, the British in Malaysia and the Dutch in Indonesia cleared large areas of rainforest to create rubber plantations. Simultaneously, local farmers saw the opportunities of rubber cultivation, and planted small groves of trees to supplement their own income.

This gave rise to two types of rubber plantations in most producing countries: the estates, or plantations and the smallholdings. Smallholdings tend to produce solid rubber (see below) while estates are essentially large-scale farms, with professional management. Most latex comes from professionally managed estates.

Latex is not made from Sap

Latex is often described as the sap of the Hevea tree. This is not an accurate description. The sap runs deeper inside the tree, beneath the cambium. Latex runs in the latex ducts which are in a layer immediately outside the cambium. This highlights the skill of the tapper. If the cambium is cut, then the tree is damaged, because the cambium is where all the growth takes place. Too much damage to the cambium, and the tree stops growing and stops making latex.

There is a common belief in the Latex production sector that latex allergies are hyped up in the United States. One argument often advanced is that latex production workers in the producing countries do not become allergic, despite handling liquid latex in hot, sweaty conditions.

The counter-argument is that this comparison (health care workers (HCW) in the USA -vs- plantation workers) is not valid, because of:

* the number of gloves donned and removed,

* the powder coating on gloves which carries proteins into the lungs of health care workers,

* the fact that HCWs are exposed to gloves from many different manufacturers, with varying levels of protein and powder.

Nevertheless, the NR producers have their own mind-set: They honestly believed that this allergy issue is all about trade. They think that the multi-national glove producers are imposing ultra-strict manufacturing limits on gloves in order to drive smaller glove makers bankrupt and win back the market share they lost to local manufacturers in the 1980s and 1990s.

No matter how unwelcome this point may be, it is how the South-east Asian manufacturers (and some Europeans) see the issue. Cases of latex allergy are relatively uncommon in Europe and very uncommon in Asia. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before we get the pain that you have right now, but for the time being, this view remains very common in the glove and latex industry outside the USA.

Russian Dandelion and guayule

Bridgestone Corporation (Bridgestone), announced recently that recent research conducted by Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations (Bridgestone Americas) has produced promising results indicating that the Russian Dandelion can become a commercially viable, renewable source of high-quality, tire-grade rubber.

Bridgestone Americas is one of several collaborators taking part in the Russian Dandelion project being led by PENRA - the Program for Excellence in Natural Rubber Alternatives - based at the Ohio State University's Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center. The company's specific role in the project is to scrutinize the performance of the rubber produced by using natural rubber extracted from Russian Dandelion.

“We know that there are more than 1,200 types of plants from which natural rubber could in theory be harvested, but finding one that could practically produce the quality and amount of rubber needed to meet the demands of today's tire market is a challenge,” said Dr. Hiroshi Mouri, President, Bridgestone Americas Center for Research and Technology.

“Bridgestone continues to dedicate substantial resources to finding sustainable alternatives for the natural rubber needed to manufacture tires and other high-quality rubber products, and we're excited about this potentially game-changing discovery with the Russian Dandelion.”

Bridgestone subsidiaries will conduct additional testing on Russian Dandelion-harvested natural rubber at their technical labs in Akron and Tokyo this summer, with larger scale testing to follow in 2014.

This news comes on the heels of a March 2012 announcement, that outlined a project to research and develop Guayule, a shrub native to the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico, as an alternative to natural rubber harvested from rubber trees (also known as Hevea trees).

For that project, Bridgestone Americas is establishing a pilot farm and constructing a rubber process research center in the southwestern United States.

Russian Dandelion and Guayule have almost identical qualities compared to natural rubber harvested from the Hevea tree, which is currently the primary source for the natural rubber used in tires.

This new project, as well as the Guayule project, is being undertaken by Bridgestone Americas in collaboration with Bridgestone. Bridgestone is providing the funding and strategic input for these projects while Bridgestone Americas is responsible for their execution. Bridgestone Americas is leveraging the resources of the Bridgestone Americas Center for Research and Technology and the Americas Technical Center in Akron, Ohio to provide technical and research support for the projects.

With the demand for tires expected to continue increasing in the near and long term, the Bridgestone Group has embraced its responsibility to develop technologies and business practices that encourage conservation of finite natural resources.

Through separate and unique efforts such as the Russian Dandelion and Guayule research projects, the Bridgestone Group is working to develop tires using 100% sustainable materials (renewable and recyclable resources).

Bridgestone is involved in other efforts to develop technologies and processes that reduce, reuse and recycle resources as well as projects to develop concept tires made from 100% sustainable materials and expects to share additional information about those projects in the future. If demand for tires keeps rising and raw material shortages persist, you may be driving soon on flowers and beans.

With more and more cars on the road everywhere from Beijing to Boston, tire manufacturers have been hard-pressed to overcome nagging shortages compounded by factory capacity problems, rising material costs and limited availability of natural rubber. That’s leading manufacturers like Bridgestone and Goodyear on a search for alternative materials as diverse as soybeans and Russian dandelions.

“Natural rubber is a sustainable, renewable resource, but the problem is that the industry is growing so rapidly -- building 82 million cars a year now -- that keeping up is a problem,” said Michael Martini, president, original equipment tire sales, for Bridgestone Americas. “So we’re looking for alternatives.”

Also called India rubber , natural rubber is primarily made by modifying latex collected from tapped rubber trees. Bridgestone relies on plantations in Liberia and Malaysia, but its competitors turn to resources in other parts of the world: Africa and Asia, South America and the Indian subcontinent.

Frenchman Charles Marie de la Condamine first described some of the material’s basic properties in 1736, and 34 years later British scientist Joseph Priestley discovered the material was good at rubbing pencil marks off paper, hence the name, rubber. But the big breakthrough came in 1839 when American Charles Goodyear discovered the process of vulcanization, which allowed the natural material to be used in long-lasting tires.

These days, those black donuts on your car contain a mix of compounds including carbon black, sulfur, peroxide and bisphenol, plus various petroleum derivatives and reinforcing materials such as steel, polyester and nylon. Natural rubber still makes up about 25 percent of the weight of a typical passenger car tire and even more for those used on commercial trucks.

The problem, as Martini noted, is that vehicle sales are booming. While sales in existing markets like the U.S., Japan and Europe may be relatively stagnant or declining, emerging markets are growing almost exponentially. The Chinese market alone has gone from just a couple of million vehicles annually to nearly 20 million in a decade and is expected to reach 30 million before decade’s end.

It takes about seven years for a rubber tree to go from seedling to a productive, mature plant. And finding more land for expanding plantations is another problem. So some members of the tire industry have joined PENRA -- the Program for Excellence in Natural Rubber Alternatives -- based at the Ohio State University’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center.

One promising alternative is the Russian dandelion, whose root structure appears extremely good at producing a natural latex almost identical to what comes out of the hevea, or common rubber tree. Botanists know the plant as taraxacum kok-saghyz -- not the common dandelion that’s the bane of American homeowners struggling to keep their lawns green.

“We know that there are more than 1,200 types of plants from which natural rubber could in theory be harvested, but finding one that could practically produce the quality and amount of rubber needed to meet the demands of today’s tire market is a challenge,” said Dr. Hiroshi Mouri, president of the Bridgestone Americas Center for Research and Technology.

Among those many potential alternatives, researchers have also zeroed in on guayule, a shrub native to the Southwest U.S. and Northern Mexico.

Tiremakers have also worked with synthetic alternatives to rubber. Such alternatives became crucial to the American effort in World War II when supplies of natural latex were largely cut off by Axis powers. The downside is that synthetics are largely dependent on petroleum.

The tire industry’s goal is to not only find sustainable alternatives to natural rubber but also to come up with alternatives for some of the non-renewable materials they now use, especially petroleum. Goodyear’s Innovation Center has come up with a new method that, researchers believe, could substitute soybean oil for as much as 7 million gallons of oil each year. An added benefit is that the alternative ingredient appears to be able to improve tread life by as much as 10 percent.

“Consumers benefit through improved tread life, Goodyear gains with increased efficiency and energy savings and we all win whenever there is a positive impact on the environment,” said Jean-Claude Kihn, Goodyear's chief technical officer.

The project, funded by a $500,000 grant from the United Soybean Board, should see prototype soybean-based tires begin testing later this year. If they live up to expectations they could reach consumers by 2015, Goodyear predicted.The Arizona desert gives way to thousands of acres lined with row after row of funny little shrubs. This is guayule (pronouncedwhy-you-lay), a plant indigenous to the southwestern United States, now being cultivated in droves by a company you've never heard of in hopes of revolutionizing the rubber industry.

That company is Yulex (the name is a mash-up of “guayule” and “latex”), founded in 1997 with the intention of making guayule a household name. Or at least a competitive product. And that's the challenge here: Scientists have long known about the natural rubber contained in guayule bark, but they've never figured out how to extract it for less than the cost of importing tropical rubber (Hevea brasiliensis). The United States actually produced rubber from guayule during World War II, when imports from Southeast Asia were cut off. But once the war ended, economics prevailed, and America torched all its guayule fields.

Nobody gave guayule another thought until the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, when a surge in rubber-glove usage revealed how many people were allergic to latex (about 10% of health-care workers, according to OSHA). There are synthetic alternatives, but they're just not as stretchy as natural rubber. Guayule performs like Hevea but contains none of the proteins that cause latex allergies.

Yulex has signed an exclusive deal in 2005 to sell its latex worldwide through Centrotrade, an international natural-rubber supplier and distributor. Martin said, manufacturers were just waiting on approval from the Food and Drug Administration. They now target a boutique niche: medical devices such as catheters or angioplasty balloons. In this market, guayule's non-allergenic qualities merit a premium over Hevea, while its greater elasticity and lower resistance make it a better choice than similarly priced synthetics.

Look for guayule surgical gloves, too. They don't cause hand fatigue like synthetic gloves do. The guayule gloves I tried at Yulex's test labs were incredibly soft.

Martin estimates the medical niche alone is worth $7 billion. “Our model is not to replace Hevea,” he says. “It's to capture the share carved out by synthetics.” And really, Yulex has no hope of going mass-market unless tropical rubber prices explode. If that changes (and it could: The International Rubber Study Group forecasts a 50% increase in rubber consumption by 2020), Yulex hopes to meet demand with guayule consumer goods. Utility gloves! Gaskets! Rubber bands! To make that leap, it would have to expand its guayule acreage to 400,000; supplying tire manufacturers, would require more like 4 million acres. (Beyond Arizona, Yulex is contracting with farmers in Australia.)

But wait, there's more. What's left from the guayule plant after rubber is extracted can be turned into adhesives, coatings, even termite-resistant particleboard. “Guayule also has a high energy content that has potential applications as a biofuel,” says Colleen McMahan, a USDA research chemist. It has been predicted that in 10 years, Yulex will be known for making a full range of guayule goods. They are not talking about just coming out with few new products, but this is going to be a whole new industry.