A topic of interest? You tell me. Relates to Prius (ground vehicles in general) because it's what meets the road. If you drive like Top Gear, you will need a lot of it. Relates to tropical SW China because more and more forests are being converted. Motivation is money of course. Over about 2 years the commodity price has tanked, but this has not slowed forest conversion rates. Rubber guys are optimistic about the future I guess. Environmental - clear hillslope, pop in seedlings at 1 to 2 meter spacing, control other regrowth with herbicides, and wait for the money to arrive. One can anticipate quite a lot of erosion, and the steeper slopes selected just look, well, like silly choices to me. Some people don't believe in gravity? Early latex processing step involves boiling with hydrochloric acid. Quite a smell to experience. To get max. yield, use a particular variety. This means large areas of genetically identical plants that stand there for decades. Guess what happens next? (hint: fungus) Rubber is native to part of the Amazon where the dry season is not very strong. Its water-transport system is quite 'liberal' compared to native trees in other areas where the dry season is more intense. Such as tropical China. So, what happens? During the dry season, rubber does a great job of drying out soils, and the little streams stop flowing. In your nearby uncut forests, the streams continue at a trickle. People do notice that, but they also notice money. So, there's your starter.
Didn't know natural rubber was still being used in tires. It sounds like the amount varies based on its cost in relation to synthetic rubber costs. Henry Ford tired this in Brazil. It didn't work out like he hoped. In fairness, he was also trying a social experiment of transplanting a mid-west American lifestyle to the local natives, and not just producing rubber. Rubber Plantations
I think as part of the broader part of agricultural misadventures, this seems like a minor harm. Let's start with the biggies. The Irish potato famine, the Dust bowl, the great leap forward where over planting led to the chinese greeting (translated) have you eaten today. Environmental changes mean that we should protect agricultural diversity. The corn monoculture in the US for ethanol fuel is also part of the problem. It needs more water, fertilzier, and pesticides. Lest you think the dead zone in the gulf isn't enough of an indicator, fertilizer and feedlots created the deadly algea bloom in lake erie http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/us/lifting-ban-toledo-says-its-water-is-safe-to-drink-again.html?_r=0 Sugar cane, and palm oil are also these transportation plants that are causing a lack of agricultural diversity. I don't know the answer, or how much of a problem the chinese rubber is, but .... together all these crops pose a problem. Good idea, building a rubber plantation in brazil. Bad idea doing it without any sensitivity to the workers eating habits, working habits, or agricultural experts deciding how to plant and where. Company villages, where the company gives good wages, but expect workers to completely change their habits rarely work.
Yeah, that was Fordlandia in the Amazon Jungle. Ford, with Harvey Firestone was more successful in Liberia. He was embraced by the father of modern Liberia, President William Tubman. Firestone still has rubber plantations in Liberia. They competed with the British and the French in Southeast Asia. The British had stolen seeds from Brazil and cultivated them in Southeast Asia.
In the tropics, mega-corn is grown on land suitable for mechanised harvest. Without regard to its relative badness, I would suggest that most of such land has already been converted. Rubber is expanding. Perhaps it seems most important to me because that's the one I see. It seems to be planted anywhere including, as I said, steep slopes. The current cultivars cannot handle frost at all. Probably related to its 'spendthrift' water piping. When I heard from some visiting scientists that progress was being made towards a frost-proof variety I got sad. Because frost is the thing currently protecting higher-elevation forests around here. Oil palm is also expanding, but elsewhere in SE Asia. Not to the benefit of orangutans, and many other less charismatic critters. But most of the bad one hears about that plant is because it gets planted on peatlands which then exhale a large amount of CO2. A friend of mine recently published a nice perspective article about the future of tropical agriculture. However, it skipped over the significance of such crops that are essentially exported to other regions. It is on my to-do list to publish a 'letter to the editor' to broadens that in this and a couple of other areas.
From a not particularly reliable source I got the information that a landholder could make more more money from rubber than heroin. If true (or even almost) you can just imagine the attraction for a fellow who has control of a chunk of forest that is not making him rich. It really means that most of the profitability in the latter crop resides further up the distribution chain. At the moment, rubber is 89 cents per pound on indexmundi. Heroin, um, isn't.
Dandelion milk had been known to contain latex for a long time. The latex exhibited the same quality as the natural rubber from rubber trees. Yet in the wild types of dandelion, the latex content is low and varies greatly. By inhibiting one key enzyme and using modern cultivation methods and optimization techniques, scientists in the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology (IME) in Germany developed a cultivar that is suitable for commercial production of natural rubber.[23] In collaboration with Continental Tires, IME is building a pilot facility. The first prototype test tires made with blends from dandelion-rubber are scheduled to be tested on public roads over the next few years. Natural rubber - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hevia braziliensis does not grow well in cold dry climates. No discussion of rubber can be had without the mention of IG Farben and Standard Oil of New jersey. IG developed Buna N before and during WWI. ENJAY, unfortunately, failed to obtain the "trade secrets" of working industrial production techniques from IG. This resulted in a rubber shortage and rationing in the US during WWII. The IG Manowitz synthetic rubber plant, consequently, still operates in Poland, today. World War II could NOT have happened without IG Farben.
Indeed rubber is a fascinating military commodity. The japanese blitzkreg down to Singapore was not in search of coconuts. Many plants produce latex not unlike that of Hevea. It is handy against herbivores, fungi, and the biochemical synthesis pathways are nearly ubiquitous. I really don't know why alternative plant sources have not been found/scaled up. This plant is just one of a huge number of examples of one of the current mistakes we are making. If you grow vast pure stands of highly genetically similar plants, you are daring Mother Nature to evolve a take down. And she will. If somebody asked me the problem with genetically modified crops, it would not be that eating them will turn us into zombies. It is that everyone is growing the exact some thing. Should be planting absolutely the most diverse genomes that don't cut too much into yield. Biology and engineering are different, y'see? First needs diversity and the second works towards unique optimized solutions.
Charles Goodyear, after he had accidently discover the "vulcanization" process, had no idea of the structure of and how rubber worked. Natural rubber is a naturally occurring polymer made of long chains of molecules. These strands are bunched up in a tangles mess like a bundle of tangled strings. Vulcanization links the strings together with sulfur atoms like the knots in a fishing net. This, in effect, stabilizes rubber so that it doesn't get hard at low temperatures and melts at high temperatures. Rubber is such an amazing material.
Add just a little sulfur you get a rubber band. Add a lot and you get a clarinet. Very few materials coll when they are stretched and shrink when they are heated. Yeah, amazing.
In April 2004, Amerytire’s regular-sized Elastothane ARCUS prototype tire passed the U.S. Department of Transport’s Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) Rule 109 tests for heat, endurance and aging. Hooks added, “We not only passed the test, we did so with flying colors.” He also noted this was the first time a polyurethane tire had passed the rigorous testing. Compared to a control tire used – a run-flat tire used on Corvettes – the ARCUS ran an average of 56?F cooler than the rubber tire and had better rolling resistance. In addition, the ARCUS met the minimum bead push-off and plunger test load standards. Hooks noted, “We realize why we ran cooler than rubber, and we are in the process of finishing the technology and believe we can improve upon these results.” Will Polyurethane Replace Rubber for Tires? | Tom Dwyer AutomotiveTom Dwyer Automotive
There is absolutely no reason why Hevea latex (evolved in response to XXX evolutionary pressures on plants), crosslinked by sulfur (a famous experimental whoopsee) should be the optimal elastomer for vehicle tires or any other application. Something better can always be developed. Gets down to price, finally. Urban atmospheric aerosols (where coal is not burned) are dominated by rubber particles. Somebody spinning their wheels Staid Prius drivers can get ~ 40k miles from a set of tires. Do the math and find this equals one molecular layer per wheel revolution. Imagine a bathroom tissue roll, unrolling. That's yer tire. Fascinating.
It was one of the reasons Ford's plantations failed. There were reasons why the wild trees were so spread apart. If only they had brought on a botanist earlier. At least one banana cultivar has been wiped out globally, and that industry is already preparing replacement ones for when the current, less tastier, one takes a hit.
Trollbait, you wake me up. We should have a banana thread. Such a fascinating plant. The internationally shipped varieties all taste boringly similar. But they more or less survive transport. Real bananas, that don't, cover a range of tastes that only people who have lived in the tropics know about. Plus there is the radioactive potassium thing. I'm tellin' ya...
