Young adults had to move to Bangkok to find decent jobs. Kaewmanee borrowed money to put about 1, trees on eight acres and persuaded three other farmers to join him, promising that people who planted rubber would become millionaires.
Most of them got pretty close, he told me. During my visit Kaewmanee showed me the books from his growing business. If the figures had been plotted on a graph, they would have mirrored those for global automobile sales: a wiggly but inexorable march upward.
Rubber riches, slowly accumulating, bought him a new home and a spiffy 4x4 vehicle and the portable electronic gadgets that his kids, home from school, were staring into. Kaewmanee had become the agricultural supervisor for his subdistrict, where 90 percent of the farmers grow H. He now has about 75, trees. His nursery sells a million seedlings a year. Forestland is still available around So Phisai, he said, ready to be turned into tires. Furious, China developed varieties of H.
Xishuangbanna represents just 0. All are now threatened by rubber. Armed with the new, cold-tolerant trees, the Chinese military established state-run plantations there. Small farmers later filled in most of the land that was left. Today you can stand on a hilltop in Xishuangbanna and see nothing but rubber trees in every direction. Promoted with state programs, sought after by Chinese corporations, H. Global natural-rubber production has jumped from 4.
To grow that extra rubber, Southeast Asian farmers have cleared about 18, square miles, an area about the size of Massachusetts and Vermont put together. All that production—combined with a decline in demand—has made rubber prices fall in the past few years, but nobody expects the growth to stop.
The boom means that a random visitor like me can drive around northern Laos at night and see fires in the hills—set by families burning patches of forest to make room for new plantings. It means teenage Thai boys drive by on motorcycles groaning beneath a half dozen garbage bags full of homemade balls of coagulated latex.
It means entire farming villages that get up at two in the morning to tap rubber trees, because latex flows best before dawn. The ecological threat posed by the rubber boom goes beyond the loss of biodiversity. The rubber trees on these new plantations are descendants of the seeds that Henry Wickham spirited out of Brazil.
As Henry Ford learned the hard way, they are terribly susceptible to blight. By the s scientists were cautioning that a single errant spore of South American leaf blight reaching Southeast Asia could bring the automobile age to a screeching halt.
No such program has been enacted. Although scientists in Brazil have found and begun testing resistant varieties of rubber trees , no Asian breeding program for blight resistance has been established.
Even ecologists have devoted little attention to the threat. Rubber tappers, working at night, fear encountering snakes in the dark, so they drench the hills with herbicides to wipe out snake-hiding ground cover.
Species that depend on the destroyed plants quickly succumb too—a further loss of biodiversity. Rain erodes the exposed earth, threatening the soil. Perhaps most serious, rubber trees consume a lot of water in the process of making latex. Producing tires is like taking groundwater from the hills and putting it on trucks for export.
As a consequence, Xu says, highland wells and rivers are drying up. Soon rubber will cover most of Southeast Asia. The problems will spread from China to much of Southeast Asia. The landscape switched back and forth between plantation and wildland in a way that reminded me, to my surprise, of the patchwork of fields and forest around my New England home.
We were going to the reserve because Liu and Langenberger think it hints at how rubber could coexist with a natural ecosystem. Unlike most nature reserves, Nabanhe is full of people. Naugatuck Emerges as Industry Hub It would take Goodyear several more years to recreate the chemical formula and perfect the process of mixing sulfur and rubber at a high temperature; he patented the process in , the year after establishing the Naugatuck India-Rubber Company in Naugatuck.
Goodyear, Charles. New York, NY, issued June 15, New Haven: Charles Goodyear, Boston, CT: The Firm, Slack, Charles. Mangan, Gregg. On This Day in Connecticut History. Charleston, SC: History Press, Geer, William Chauncey. The Reign of Rubber. Well, the milk in milkweed is—you guessed it— natural latex! Naturally occurring latex sap can be collected and refined into other, more diverse and useful products. Here at Kent Elastomer, we use highly refined and researched methods to manufacture natural rubber latex for use across medical and surgical fields , food and beverage, industrial, sport and leisure , orthodontia, dental , and laboratories.
Natural rubber is a versatile elastomer that can be put to a wide variety of uses, but knowing which one is right for you is crucial. For example, some people have allergic reactions to latex which effectively makes most rubber products unusable.
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E enquiries aquasealrubber. The natural rubber market is a huge part of the global economy, with the price of rubber itself fluctuating hour by hour. Without rubber, though, the global economy would suffer greatly.
Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and India are the top four producers of natural rubber, respectively. Thailand, in particular, relies massively on its exports, of which rice and rubber are the primary commodities.
It has suffered greatly in the past as a result of droughts, reduced global demand, and overproduction.
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