Cars need tires to go anywhere and some of the materials used to make tires is in short supply, forcing tire makers to look into alternative options. Currently, a few tire companies are looking at sourcing rubber from the guayule plant, a weed that grows all over the southwest United States.
The tire industry is having a hard time coming up with enough rubber to meet demand. Natural rubber is usually harvested from Hevea trees, according to AutoGuide, also called rubber trees. The milk-like sap of these trees, latex, is tapped by scoring the bark, just like maples for making syrup, then refined into rubber.
About 70 percent of the world’s supply of natural rubber is from Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, but production has been falling for some time; according to Science Daily and MotorTrend, the trees are fragile things, highly susceptible to disease and even moderate temperature variations.
Tire makers are trying to find an alternative, one of which is the guayule (pronounced “why-you-lee”) plant, parthenium argentatum, a weed that grows all over the southwestern United States.
Guayule isn’t the only latex-secreting plant; AutoGuide quotes a Bridgestone exec as saying “there are hundreds if not thousands.” The Fountain of Internet Wisdom, Wikipedia, reports at least 20,000, including milk-cap mushrooms and some coniferous species (read: pine trees) though it’s more common among plants in tropical climates than temperate.
Curiously, opium is the latex of poppies, though obviously put to insidious uses.
Guayule is a weed that grows on next-to-nothing, so it’s easily farmed. To extract the latex, plants are chopped off at the root and macerated en masse. The latex is extracted from there. The waste is usable too; according to CleanTechnica, the plant produces farnesene, a biofuel, and the leftovers from latex extraction, after processing, have the same energy potential in British Thermal Units or btu’s as charcoal.
Granted, this is nothing new. Time magazine reported on the potential of guayule rubber in 1928 and according to AutoGuide, the U.S. Government experimented with tires made from guayule rubber during World War II, but it didn’t go anywhere. There are companies already using the rubber from it, such as Yulex, which provide guayule rubber to makers of everything from yoga mats to medical supplies to “family planning,” without going into too much detail. (Infer what you wish.)
Yulex is also partnering with Cooper Tires for development. Bridgestone is also looking into guayule rubber production.
A while before hitting stores
It is going to be some time before guayule rubber tires hit stores or appear on, say, a new Camry at Toyota dealers in Edmunds, Wa., or wherever. Bridgestone and Cooper estimate it will be five years until commercial production is viable and neither has a prototype ready yet. According to Science Daily, Apollo Vredestein, a Danish tire company, produced prototype tires this year from latex sourced from guayule, which is farm-grown in Spain for bio-fuels, and Russian dandelion.
However, there has to be a new source for natural rubber. Natural rubber, according to AutoGuide, is preferable to synthetic, as it copes better with variations and extremes of temperature. The typical passenger tire, according to MotorTrend, is comprised of less than 20 percent natural rubber. Aircraft or other commercial tires are up to 40 percent natural rubber.
The Great Wiki Oracle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latex